Discursive Features and Manipulation in Michelle Obama's Speech Delivered at the 2024 Democratic National Convention

This paper investigates the discursive features (structures and strategies) Former First Lady Michelle Obama (henceforth, the speaker) employs in her political campaign speech in support of Kamala Harris, a presidential candidate, delivered on August 21st, 2024 at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (henceforth, DNC) held in Chicago.Drawing its theoretical insights from Teun Adrianus van Dijk's discourse analytical theory and the descriptive mixed-method research design, the study specifically explores how the speaker deploys language to manipulate her audience and encode her ideologies or/and those of her social group.The findings exude that she employs, in varying proportions, such discursive structures as speech acts, formal structures and deictic expressions.These structures serve to realize the ideological strategy of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation.That is, the speaker ideologically polarizes the actors represented in her speech.Four other ideological stances (historian, propagandist, conservative and social democrat) have been discovered in the findings too.To reach her goal, the speaker employs twenty-two discursive strategies including situation description, positive self-presentation, negative other-presentation, polarization, comparison, allusion, passivization, activization, nominalization, repetition, etc.The study concludes that the speaker deliberately uses the aforementioned discursive features to manipulate or control (the minds of) her audience with a view to making them vote for Kamala Harris who happens to be the invested presidential candidate of the Democratic Party to which she belongs.