Abstract
Political debate is a type of highly confrontational speech activity, hence the participating candidates always need to concentrate more on pushing their opponents to an adverse or unpopular position. However, the literature focused on the attack is scarce. Based on video-taped data from the 1998 Taipei Mayoral Debates, this thesis investigates strategies of the three candidates’ (including Chen Shui-bian, Ma Ing-jiu, and Wang Jian-xuan) persuasive attack, in regard to both content and linguistic form. Following Benoit & Wells’ (1996) persuasive attack model, the content of persuasive attack often emphasizes the opponents’ sayings and doings (including intensifying the extent of the damage, prolonging the persistence of negative effects, exacerbating the recent harmful effects rather than remote ones, emphasizing the innocence and helplessness of victims, stressing the obligation to protect certain groups, accusing opponents of inconsistency, and illuminating bad effects on the audience), or stresses the responsibility for these inappropriate works (including articulating the opponent’s intention to achieve the awful outcome, claiming the opponent’s advance planning of that evil, emphasizing the opponent’s knowledge of the act’s consequence, condemning the opponent for the prior commission of the offensive act, and accusing the opponents of benefiting from the offensive act). By these two groups of strategies, the speakers can arouse the audience’s antagonism and rage more easily. On the other hand, from the perspectives of pragmatics, when choosing the linguistic form of persuasive attack, candidates not only employ direct strategy, but also indirect ones (e.g. question, innuendo, sarcasm, citation). The purpose of using indirect persuasive attack is to realize speakers’ different goals, some of which may be even at odds with each other. Furthermore, the main goal is to avoid certain responsibilities for what has been said. In addition, by quantitatively analyzing candidates’ use of persuasive attack and comparing them with Benoit & Wells’ (1996) findings, this thesis also finds that: 1) frequency of candidates’ attack increase with the approaching of the election; 2) both the nature of speech activity and simplicity influence candidates’ use of persuasive attack; 3) the main challenger always attacks much while the weak candidate attacks according to his role in the campaign; 4) the incumbent candidate is always being attacked most while the weak one the least; 5) the use of candidates’ linguistic form of persuasive attack is diverse, and the speeches of candidates who prefer indirect attack could be considered more interesting. It is hoped that this thesis provides an overall picture of how candidates employ persuasive attack when participating in political debates and constructs a complete attack system in political debates as well.