Persuasion in Obama’s Speeches: A Case Study of Nowruz Greetings

Applying Van Dijk’s principles of critical discourse analysis, the current study aimed at describing critically thepersuasive strategies and reflective remarks of US ex-president’s, Barak Obama’s, Nowruz speeches to the Iranianpeople. The speeches were mainly about Iran’s nuclear program. For this purpose samples of Obama’s 2013-2016Nowruz speeches were analyzed to discover the hidden ideologies as well as to disclose the persuasive strategies. Themethod was descriptive and the results of the study implied that in spite of Barak Obama’s worthwhile Nowruzspeeches, practically, the tensions between Iran and US did not end

Keywords:

language , discourse , CDA , persuasive strategy , accommodation and audience design