Emotional rhetoric of candidate’s wife: linguistic analysis of the speeches of Michelle Obama and Ann Romney

Abstract

This research focuses on the emotional story building process based on the textual analysis of candidates for First Lady, Ann Romney and Michelle Obama, speeches that were pronounced during the Republican and Democratic conventions of the U.S. presidential campaign of 2012. The main objective is to identify the emotional markers included in the texts delivered respectively in each of these conventions that affect the semantic, morphosyntactic and pragmatic level. The analysis of the linguistic resources used reveals that, as a key part of the electoral campaign strategy, both were deliberately articulated as a non political speech, and sustained a marked emotional storytelling, focusing attention on the human dimension of their husbands, a fact that contributed to draw a more personal and intimate of the candidate profile.