A Pragmatic Analysis of Barack Obama’s Speech on Climate Change from an Eco-pragmatic Perspective

Abstract

This study is an attempt to examine ragmatic strategies that are employed by former U.S. President Barack Obama in his 2015 Conference of the Parties, 21 annual meeting, henceforth  COP21 climate change speech. This is tested within a framework of combining eco-linguistics with pragmatic main domains. Urgency, responsibility, and collective collaboration through pragmatic tools are addressed in the current study aimed to identify the eco-pragmatic strategies as represented by speech acts, implicature, metaphorical framing, and politeness used in Obama’s speech. The study utilizes a qualitative approach, and applies a four-dimensional analytical model. The findings reveal that Obama effectively employs declarative and directive speech acts, warnings, conversational implicatures, shared knowledge presuppositions, and metaphorized frames to frame climate change as an urgent, ethical, and collective issue. On the other hand, face-saving strategies function as diplomatic mechanisms promoting international cooperation which is away from blame attribution, meanwhile using metaphorical dramatization to provide cognitive and emotional triggers for mobilizing action.