Genre-based Analysis of presidential Resignation Speeches with Reference to Richard Nixon and Jamal Abdul-Nasser : A Contrastive analysis

Abstract

Political resignation speeches are a genre of political speeches. They are utilized by politicians such as presidents, prime ministers, ministers and others to announce their leaving or quitting of their governmental positions in times of political and economic crises and scandals. Failure to fulfill their commitments and duties is one of the reasons why politicians resign. Such type of speeches provide an opportunity for politicians to justify their mistakes and gain sympathy from the audience.

  The problem of the paper is to inspect resignation speeches released by presidents Nixon of the United States and Abdul-Nasser of the Egypt. For the analysis of the selected data an eclectic model is adopted by Soriano (2023) genre analysis and the tactics set up by Rossettee (2019). It is a qualitative method to give a deeper description insight of the attitude in this study. The researcher endeavors to answer the questions raised:  To what expanse is the adopted model applicable in these two speeches and how the tactics are employed by the politicians to help them to convey their ideas and convince their audience to take sides with them. The present paper aims to uncover the genre aspects of two political resignation speeches.

  The paper has two directions. The first one deals with the theoretical aspect while the second part is dedicated to analyzing the two resignation speeches based on the proposed elected model.

  As a conclusion, the analysis has shown lack of four moves (the announcing the resignation, assignment of the next president, the resigning president’s achievements and supplication) so the researcher proposed to modify the model by adding these moves. As far as the tactics are concerned, the two presidents used them differently to achieve the main goals of their speeches.