Voice in Selected Human Trafficking Speeches

Abstract

The present research examines the linguistic resources used by selected celebrity speakers to adopt a position and engage with their audience. Metadiscourse resources provide ample opportunity to the writers/speakers to organize their propositional information and involve readers/hearers in their discourses. To this end, it is hypothesized that speakers' speeches do involve their evaluation and that they are just like academic writers in that they situate themselves to reflect and shape a valued disciplinary ethos through voice, which they manage through systems of stance and engagement. Drawing upon six speeches on human trafficking, the qualitative and quantitative analyses reveal that the interactional resources are an integral part of these speeches, and that stance and engagement elements were salient in the speeches. The employment of such devices will help the speakers prime their audiences to view the events and the involved participants in certain direction