Political Speeches of Some African Leaders from Linguistic Perspective (1981-2013)
Dr. Ibrahim Mohamed Al-Faki

Abstract
This paper explores linguistic elements in political discourses in general and in political speeches, in particular. It presents some political speeches of some contemporary African leaders. The paper aims to contribute to the field of Critical Discourse Analysis (henceforth CDA), and the sub-field Political Discourse Analysis (henceforth PDA), by examining and analyzing political speeches from a linguistic perspective. The paper also aims to show how linguistic tools can be manipulated to reveal speakers’ ideology and speakers’ political stance. We use different linguistic tools for the analysis of the speeches. These include M.A.K Hallida’s Transitivity”, Herbert Paul Grice’s Speech Act Theory”, as well as semantic representations appearing in the political analyzed speeches. This study adopts quantitative methods to determine the presence of the examined linguistic tools found in the political speeches of some African leaders.

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