The Persuasive Use of Presupposition: A Pragmatic Study of Obama’s Inaugural Speech

Pragmatics has a lot of tools such as presupposition. Presupposition represents a fundamental role in the process of communication in general and in political speech in particular. Politicians tend to employ presupposition to accomplish various aims. Based on Barack Obama’s’ inaugural  speech, January, 2009, this paper is concerned with analyzing the persuasive use of  presupposition at both existential, lexical and structural levels, for the aim of exploring how Obama has succeeded in achieving his real political goals by employing  presupposition willing to provide a participation to comprehend political speeches. This paper adopts Levinson Model of Presupposition Triggers (1983) as the analysis tool for the ex-president Barack Obama’s inaugural speech in 2009. The taxonomy of presupposition has been analyzed to figure out the function of each type. Analyzing Obama’s inaugural address is really great, because he was the first African-American president of the USA and who confronted great economic political and social problems both in the USA and the rest of the world and his speech must reflect his concern with these issues to get domestic and international support. As a conclusion, presupposition has been employed in political speech for the purpose of persuasion and to gain the audience’s support to the side of the speaker thus he can achieve his intentional goals.