المستخلص: |
The present study investigates the image repair strategies employed by president Biden as defense strategies in response to political crisis cases in his final state of the union address from a rhetorical pragmatic perspective. The current study aims at analyzing the types of image repair strategies and tactics employed to defend himself and repair the damaged public image, identifying the types of speech acts used for realizing these tactics pragmatically, finding out the most common appeals utilized to achieve and reinforce the persuasive effect of these strategies, and discovering the most frequently used rhetorical pragmatic tropes, according to the eclectic model developed for the analysis. The analysis reveals that four types of image repair strategies are used, namely: Denial, evasion of responsibility, reduction of offensiveness, and corrective action, in which reduction of offensiveness is the most achieved strategy through the bolstering tactic as the frequently employed tactic in Biden's address. The realization of image repair tactics as pragmatic strategies is through triggering speech acts, with the expressive SAs of acclaiming (praising) and empathizing that realize the bolstering tactic, followed by the representative SAs of asserting and claiming as the most used SAs to realize image repair tactics pragmatically in Biden's address. Pathos and ethos are the most commonly achieved appeals. And the most frequently utilized tropes are the substitution trope of overstatement and the destabilization trope of metaphor.
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