Persuasive Strategies Employed in Political Discourse for Resolving the ‘To Get or not to Get Vaccinated’ Dilemma

Abstract

In 2020 the pandemic-stricken world saw a glimmer of hope as a number of vaccines against the Covid-19 virus were discovered. However, the vaccination was not welcomed enthusiastically by everyone, despite constant appeals of authorities worldwide that the vaccination was safe and efficient. The aim of the research, which has a qualitative paradigm, was to conduct a pragmatic analysis of a corpus of pro-vaccination speeches, made by prominent politicians, in the second half of 2021. The stress was put on inspecting politicians’ position towards the vaccination process in their respective countries; the provaccination arguments they used to make their statements more persuasive, and how they addressed the vaccinated and unvaccinated people in terms of what speech acts (Searle,1976), politeness maxims (Leech, 1983) and strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1987) they employed to reach out to them. The findings suggest that politicians’ persuasion efforts were in close correlation with the vaccination rate and that they rested on both the ‘loss’ and ‘gain’ frame; the varying of the speech acts with which the vaccinated and unvaccinated people were addressed; a strategic use of the positive, negative, bold on record and off record politeness strategies, as well as intermittent obeyance and disobeyance of politeness maxims.