Investigating pragma-rhetorical strategies utilized by American commencement speakers to motivate graduates for managing future opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Motivating emotions is a critical factor in empowering students to manage the troubles they might face. Educational organizations pay great efforts to employ all the available means that can motivate their students for better learning from early stages until universities or institutes levels. The administrations of some universities and institutes, especially in the United States of America, do not stop there and pay more attention on motivating their students at the graduation parties on how to manage future businesses and challenges. This study explores how commencement speakers utilize success stories pragma-rhetorically to motivate the graduates to behave wisely to take future decisions. It investigates the pragmatic-rhetorical strategies in the motivational storytelling that is delivered within commencement speeches at American universities and institutes. It aims to recognize and analyze these strategies that commencement speakers employ as strategic strategies in presenting their stories to achieve their motivational purposes. More specifically, it explores how speech acts, rhetorical tropes, conversational implicatures, and rhetorical appeals are used and distributed in the storytelling discourse. To this end, the researchers selected ten commencement speeches delivered by American commencement speaker.

Examining the rhetorical strategies employed in the humorous discourse of Chinese talk shows

“…Moreover, some researchers explored rhetorical strategies in academic articles by using the three-move Create a Research Space (CARS) model (Marta 2019); others looked at the intricacies of how English euphemisms and dysphemism serve as rhetorical and strategic tools in political media discourse (Aytan et al 2021); and finally, a pragmatic-rhetorical strategy was examined in the discourse of commencement speakers by Mubarak & Rhaif (2021).…”

image construction of the City Yiwu in overseas media

“…From the word frequency results, it is not tough to make a simple conclusion that Yiwu gained more international attention through various trade fairs during 2016-2021 compared with the corpus from 2010-2015. Although word frequency analysis shows that there are some differences between the two sets of corpus, further analysis is still needed (Mubarak & Rhaif, 2021;Tampubolon et al, 2021).…”