Delineating the Language Features of War Speeches

The writer sets out to study excerpted samples of the war speeches made across the world between the World War eras and the present with a view to finding out the linguistic choices favoured by war leaders over time to drum up support for wars. It is argued here that there may be something unique in the linguistic choices made in war speeches which convince people to support the prosecution of wars despite the wanton destruction that follows them. Framed on a descriptive research design, with stylistics as the theoretical framework, the study examines the excerpts chosen by deliberate sampling so as to identify and analyze the features they share. The analysis reveals that the speeches share many linguistic features in common, all of which may be responsible for the control of the minds and actions of the people.