Parallelism in One of Hillary Clinton s Speeches: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Parallelism is a linguistic phenomenon. It refers to the use of the same pattern of words for two or more ideas having the same degree of importance arranged in successive lines and in a balanced manner, enabling the reader to understand the meaning or grasp the relation among ideas. Stylistically, parallelism, with its different types, is used by politicians to persuade audience to sympathize with their views, and make their speech more memorable. This paper studies parallelism as a rhetorical device from a critical discourse perspective following van Dijk s (1993) socio- cognitive approach and his notion of Ideological Square (2006a). The present study investigates how Hillary Clinton (Democratic presidential nominee) has made use of parallelism in her political speech during the fourth and final night of the Democratic National Convention in December, 2016. The study has concluded that parallelism is an important devise used to show and reflect dominance, the central intention of this approach, in the political context. Moreover, it is used by Hillary to reflect the positive properties and others negative ones, hence it helps her in expressing her ideology.