A discourse analysis on argumentative statements delivered by democratic presidential nominees in the 2008 presidential debates of USA during primary elections season

This study aims at finding out how the two presidential nominees “Hillary Clinton” and “Barack Obama” from Democratic Party formulate their claim, data, warrant, rebuttal, qualifier, and backing on their argumentative statements.

This is a descriptive qualitative research. The data of this study are the transcripts which were taken from three times debates during primary elections season. Those three debates are debate on January 31st, 2008 in Hollywood, California sponsored by CNN, The Los Angles Times and Politico, on February 21st, 2008 in Austin Texas sponsored by CNN, and debate on February 26th, 2008 in Cleveland, Ohio sponsored by MSNBC. The debates were taken from www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com. The Toulmin’s model and the criteria of recognizing argumentative elements by Zahro are utilized to recognize the argumentative elements in the candidates’ statements. The procedure proposed by Miles and Huberman is applied to analyze the data.

The result of this study is that both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had delivered convincing arguments in the debates due to the fact that they had fulfilled criteria of forming an argument as stated by Toulmin. The domestic policies which were mostly debated are Health care issue, Mortgage crisis, Immigration, and Economy. There are many ways of Obama and Clinton in formulating their argumentative statements. Obama had eighteen ways in delivering his arguments. Those are he proposed policy claim followed by fact, policy claim followed by data and motivational warrant, policy claim followed by rebuttal, policy claim and no data supporting the claim, policy claim followed by fact and substantive warrant, factual claim followed by rebuttal, factual claim followed by fact, factual claim followed by statistical data, factual claim but no data supporting the claim, factual claim with qualifier followed by fact, value claim with data inside the claim, value claim but no data supporting the claim, value claim followed by information and motivational warrant, value claim
followed by information, value claim followed by rebuttal, fact followed by policy claim and motivational warrant, authoritative warrant followed by policy claim and data, and fact followed by value claim.

Meanwhile, Clinton had twenty one ways in delivering her arguments. Those are policy claim followed by information, policy claim followed by fact, policy claim with qualifier followed by information, policy claim followed by observation result, policy claim with fact inside the claim, policy claim with qualifier followed by information and authoritative warrant, policy claim followed by statistical data, policy claim followed by rebuttal, policy claim with example inside the claim, policy claim with fact inside followed by motivational warrant, policy claim but no data supporting the claim, policy claim followed by information and authoritative warrant, factual claim with qualifier followed by information, factual claim followed by narrative, factual claim but no data supporting the claim, value claim with qualifier followed by rebuttal, value claim followed by information, value claim followed by substantive warrant and narrative, value claim followed by fact, value claim but no data supporting the claim, value claim with fact inside followed by substantive warrant.

Generally, Obama and Clinton proposed their claims in the form of complete declarative sentence. The most common words Obama and Clinton used are the words “I think” and “I believe” before they proposed their claims. Moreover, they used the linguistic indicator “so” and “consequently” in proposing claims. And, oftentimes, they used reason indicator “because”, “the reason is..” in their data. In those three debates Obama used qualifier “extensively” and “absolutely” in his claim, while Clinton used qualifier “absolutely”, “necessarily”, “obviously”, “passionately”, and “certainly” in her claims. In proposing rebuttal, Obama used linguistic indicator “but”, “if..”, and “otherwise”, while Clinton used linguistic indicator “if..”, “but,if..” and “except”.