Abstract
The use of language in 2023 presidential aspirants’ campaign speeches forms the core of the study. This paper is aimed at identifying the use of rhetoric in presidential campaign speeches of 2023 elections by Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso of NNPP, Bola Ahmad Tinubu of APC, Atiku Abubakar of PDP and Peter Obi of LP. With metaphor as an important weapon in rhetoric, the study is set to analyse the conceptual metaphors and their significance in making appeal to the audiences’ emotion and decision-making faculty. It is a qualitative research design. The data was collected through online television channels (Channels Television, Vanguard News and Premium Times), library and internet searches. Norman Fairclough's three-tier model of Critical Discourse Analysis, Discourse Practice, is applied. Discourse Practice comprises text production, text distribution and text consumption. In the process of text production, the writer or speaker encodes certain ideas and ideologies in the text just as observed in the referent campaign speeches of Bola Ahmad Tinubu, Kwankwaso, Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi. Based on that, the audience are well identified. The level of text interpretation gives room for the audience to decode the meaning according to their beliefs, knowledge and previous experience. The text, thus, might shape or reshape the audience’s views and beliefs. Furthermore, Aristotle's three rhetorical appeals, ethos, pathos and logos, were employed. This gives room for analysis of rhetors’ moral credibility, appeal to the audiences’ emotion and logical reasoning. In addition, Lakoff’s and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory is employed in the analysis of different shades of metaphor in the referent campaign speeches. The research findings reveal that all the four main actors of 2023 Nigerian Presidential Elections employed rhetoric in their campaign speeches by applying different conceptual metaphors such as, metaphor of economic restructuring, irresponsibility, access to education, employment etc. The research concludes that rhetoric is a persuasive tool used in political discourse as observed in the referent campaign speeches and metaphor is a powerful tool of persuasion used by politicians to express self, shorten the distance between they and their audience as well as communicate their ideologies in expressible means.
Keywords: Influence, Persuasion, Rhetoric, Metaphor
DOI: 10.36349/alqajolls.2025.v01i01.024
author/Mu'awiyya Garba & Surayya Ado Saleh
journal/AL-QALAM JLLS 1(1) | December 2025
