Mehrdad Naghibian - Sharif University of Technology
Behrooz Mahmoodi Bakhtiari - University of Tehran

President Obama is famous among politicians and world leaders for being an influential orator whose speeches could attract the audience; not only ordinary people but also the other politicians and decision makers. As President Obama was continuing his push for the Iran nuclear deal, he delivered an hour speech at American University on August 5, 2015. The purpose of this article is to explore and highlight the rhetoric of convincing and arguing in that crucial speech, addressing one of the most debated issues in contemporary world politics, i.e. the Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers. In order to find the method used by president Obama responding the critiques of the deal, proving that this deal is a good deal , convincing the American public opinion about the triumph of negotiation, and avoiding another costly war in the Middle East, an analysis at the level of lexicon, grammar, and discourse has been carried out in this article. Obama’s resort to all of the three linguistic levels mentioned above that aimed at convincing the public and achieving the speech’s goals was identified in the analysis of the transcribed text.

Convincing Strategies; Textual Metadiscourse; Interpersonal Metadiscourse; Communicative Action