Manipulative Strategies in Political Discourse: A Comparative Pragma-Rhetorical and Semantic Analysis of English and Arabic Political Speeches

This paper examines how politicians speaking in English and Arabic deceive their audience by using pragmatic and rhetorical skills. The semantic analysis exposes the conscious and uncon-scious meanings of their messages, showing how meaning is manufactured within and potential-ly manipulated in English and Arabic political discourse. A mixed-method approach, along with purposive sampling and qualitative, quantitative, and comparative analyses, was applied to en-sure the selection of major speeches representative of key political events. It contained famous Western and Arab politicians' statements on world affairs from the Iraq War to the present. The analysis examined manipulation by the use of speech acts, presuppositions, Grice's Maxims, rhetorical techniques, and semantic devices. The researcher delineated these features of lan-guage and their implications on the main point of each speech. The results showed intriguing manipulation practices by politicians from both linguistic groups. English-speaking politicians rely on directness, trust, and positive narration through statements of fact, promises, logic, and credibility. Arabic-speaking politicians went for a much more subtle approach, establishing ci-vility to create a rapport of friendship and shared goals and emotional appeals to invoke shared identity and history. While the languages that they speak are different, both the English and Ar-abic politicians share certain characteristics: directness and assertiveness, rapport, framing, and clever figurative language. The results showed that the two language groups appealed to differ-ent persuasive strategies but differed in culture and language. The English-speaking group relied on directness and individual independence while the Arabic speaking group relied on subtleties, collective identity, allusions to religion or traditions. All these discrepancies demonstrated how language, culture, and political discourse interact and how language can affect audiences across cultures. These findings are important for understanding political communication dynamics, shaping language training, improving politician cross-cultural communication, and guiding polit-ical discourse analysis research. Understanding cultural differences can improve political en-gagement in various circumstances.