Understanding narratives of leaders: speech analysis

Abstract

Through this project, our aim is to analyse the narratives of leaders to understand the following:  What are the broader narrative structures being used by the speakers to create a cohesive and appealing speech?  In terms of content, how do speakers draw upon their knowledge, experiences and world view to create a strong narrative for their audiences?  How does the speaker’s rhetorical language facilitate and amplify audience involvement? Moreover, we also aim to understand any underlying patterns that might emerge from our analysis. These patterns can be in terms of similarities in a particular context, across speakers or similarities in styles of individual speakers, across different contexts.