Analysis of Fallacies in Hillary and Trump's Second Presidential Debate

In every day conversations at home, school, bus…etc., people always utilize different strategies in language use in order to achieve their aims to get what they want, one of these strategies is making fallacies.Fallacies can be definedas a deceptive tactic that the arguer may employ to convince the listenerbyviolating one of the ten rules of reasonableness.Those fallacies are usually exploited via the candidates in the presidential debates in order to beat the other party and persuade their onlookers to win the electoral race. Therefore, the current study aims at identifying the effect of fallacies and their role as a maneuvertools in political text, it detects the ten rules of reasonableness and the methods by which the discussants my violate them to commit a fallacy. Likewise the study tends to show the various types of fallacies and which fallacy score the higher frequency. The study hypothesized that violating rule4 is the most prominent fallacy committed in the debates under investigation.The data includes the secondUS presidential debate that set between Clinton and Trump in 2016.It is analyzed based on Emeren's et al.(2002) concept of fallacies. The main results obtained from the analysis verified the hypothesis and concluded thatcommitting fallacies is widely used by arguers in presidential debates, the debatersviolate all rules and the violation of rule 4 is the most prominent one.Besides, rule9 can be described as the general characteristics of the debate since all the debate is about violating it.