摘 要

英国首相温士顿·丘吉尔能言善辩，是一位出色的演说家，二战期间很多危机得以化解，在很大程度上得益于其个人卓越的演说才能。因此，研究温士顿·丘吉尔在化解战时危机的演讲中所使用的修辞策略具有一定的现实意义。本文首先回顾了中外学者对温士顿·丘吉尔演讲风格的研究，然后收集了他的几篇著名战时演讲词，从语音、词汇、句法层面对其演说词中所使用频率最高的修辞方法进行了研究；最后，本文以亚里士多德修辞学理论作为支撑，从理性诉求、情感诉求以及道德诉求三方面探索了它们在温士顿·丘吉尔化解战时危机的政治演说中所发挥的作用。

关键词：温士顿·丘吉尔演说；修辞策略；三种诉求

Abstract

Winston Churchill, as a British Prime Minister, is an outstanding speaker. Due to his skilled speech, a lot of crisis has been solved. Therefore, studying Winston Churchill’s speech has a practical significance to a certain degree. First and foremost, this paper reviews some scholars’ study at home and abroad on Winston Churchill’s speech and then collects some of his famous wartime speeches, exploring his most frequently used rhetorical strategies in his speech from the aspect of phonology, lexicology and syntax. Lastly, the influence of Aristotelian Rhetoric on Winston Churchill’s public speech are also researched from three levels—logical appeal, emotional appeal and credibility appeal, based on the theory of Aristotelian Rhetoric.

Key words: Winston Churchill’s speech; Rhetoric strategies; Three Appeals

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

2.1 Studies on Winston Churchill’s speeches at home 2

2.2 Studies on Winston Churchill’s speeches abroad 2

2.3 Winston Churchill’s crisis-solving speeches 3

3. Rhetorical Strategies in Winston Churchill’s Crisis-solving Speeches 4

3.1 Phonological level 4

3.2 Lexical level 5

3.3 Syntactic level 7

4. Aristotle’s Three Appeals and Winston Churchill’s Crisis-solving Speeches 10

4.1 Aristotle’s Three Appeals 10

4.2 Being clear: Logical appeal 11

4.3 Being persuasive: Emotional appeal 12

4.4 Being trustworthy: Credibility appeal 13

5. Conclusion 15

References 16

Acknowledgements 17

Rhetoric Strategies for Crisis-solving in Winston Churchill’s Speeches

1 Introduction

Public speech plays an essential role in selling, election, especially in crisis-solving, be it the economic crisis, the war crisis, or disaster crisis. This speech aims at convincing the listeners to agree with you and take actions in order.

Throughout history, many celebrities gave famous speeches in public to solve the crisis, such as Franklin Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi and Ronald Reagan and so on. These celebrities had a profound and lasting effect on society and even reversed the situation. For example, Martin Luther King delivered his speech named I Have a Dream in 1963. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’.” This is a part of the speech given by Martin Luther King. His words are powerful and successfully fight for human rights of black people with great appeal to emotion.

Public speech also plays an essential role in war crisis, for instance, George Ⅵ,a king of England who was diagnosed with serious stutter, gave an encouraging wartime speech declaring war in Germany, expressing the views and stirring citizen’s enthusiasm and ultimately winning their support. However, in this paper, Winston Churchill also brings about a radical change in Britain even in the whole world by means of his various speeches. His speech can be seen as a landmark that has reversed the situation with rhetorical strategies, emotional appeal, logical appeal and credibility appeal.

2 Literature Review

Winston Churchill’s speech is a great success in Britain even in the world. Over the years, many scholars both from home and abroad have studied his speech. Some of them have studied its interpersonal function, some have explored its discourse function, and others analyze its stylistic features. This section is to make a review to the previous research of his speech from the perspective of rhetoric devices.

2.1 Studies on Winston Churchill’s speeches at home

Domestically, researches on Winston Churchill’s speech mostly were journals and academic dissertation. Li Xiaolong(2015), from Yunnan University, listed the rhetorical devices in Winston Churchill’s speech Never Give In, Never, Never, such as repetition, metaphor, parallelism, anastrophe and so on. And also, she took virous examples and analyzed the effect of these rhetorical strategies^[1]. Cai Yingying(2012), in her essay Stylistic analysis of the Speech on Hitler’s Invasion of the U.S.S.R she explores the style of Churchill’s speech from the aspect of words, phonetics, syntax and semantics. She also emphasizes the use of rhetoric makes Churchill’s speech terse and forceful and have high literary value^[2].

2.2 Studies on Winston Churchill’s speeches abroad

There are many foreign researchers casting their eyes in the rhetoric research on Winston Churchill’s speeches. Richard Toye(2010), examines Winston Churchill’s first radio broadcast and contemporary reactions to it from a rhetorical perspective^[3]. Crespo-Fernández, Eliecer(2013), in her article Words as Weapons for Mass Persuasion: Dysphemism in Churchill’s wartime speeches, explores the words and expressions in Winston Churchill’s speech and points out that metaphor commonly exists in his speeches, which instill courage and inspiring confidence of his fellows faced with such difficult times in Britain―a war against the powerful Nazi Germany^[4]. In We Shall Fight: A Rhetorical Analysis of Churchill’s Famous speech, Maguire Lori(2014) analyzes Winston Churchill’s famous speech deeply, considering Winston Churchill’s various audience. She also studies the different views that the prime minister sees to the conflict: the concrete level and the abstract level^[5]. Furthermore, S Humphries(2006), in his article A Metafunctional Analysis of Winston Churchill’s We Shall fight on the beaches speech, makes use of systemic functional grammar to analyze Winston Churchill’s speech, exploring the experiential, interpersonal and textual meanings in it^[6].

2.3 Winston Churchill’s crisis-solving speeches

Winston Churchill, a legendary man, was ever a Prime Minister of Britain. He, considered as one of the most significant political leaders in the 20th century, led the British people to win the Second World War. He was also listed as one of the most persuasive orators in the world in the past century by the American magazine People.

Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches are considerably famous, including the Speech on Hitler’s Invasion of the U.S.S.R, Blood, Sweat and Tears, We Shall Fight and Their Finest Hour and so on. For instance, We Shall Fight was given in the House of Commons on June 4, 1940 at the end of the evacuation of British and French troops from Dunkirk. And, Blood, Sweat and Tears―Winston Churchill’s first speech as a prime minister was delivered on May 13, 1940, faced with the great national crisis. His confidence and powerful words impressed her listeners very much. He gives his speech with good body language and eye contact to make great emotional appeal. As a consequence, citizens successfully built their confidence to resist the fascist invasion and protect their nation.

3 Rhetorical Strategies in Winston Churchill’s Crisis-solving Speeches

3.1 Phonological level

3.1.1 Alliteration

Alliteration refers to the repetition of the initial consonant sounds in sentences^[7]. It not only adds the beauty of language in the speech, but also makes it easier for audience to understand, so it is widely used in speeches.

Examples are as follows:

(1) I see also the dull, drilled, docile, brutish masses of the Hun soldier, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts^[8]. (From the Speech on Hitler’s Invasion of the U.S.S.R)