ipl-logo

Deliberative Speech

786 Words4 Pages
A Deliberative Speech in a Ceremonial Occasion

An Academy Award acceptance speech delivered by Leonardo DiCaprio at February 28th, 2016 was an interesting recent speech. I will identify the rhetorical situation of the speech which includes the audience, the occasion, the speaker, and the speech. At the same time, I will also analyze how the speaker’s purpose was translated into the speech, how the audience adapted with the speaker’s intention, and how the arguments were delivered to the audience with certain arrangement and language style.
Delivered during an award show where the speaker won recognition as “Best Actor” of 2016, the speech was expected to be a ceremonial speech. As the occasion, one can easily identify the award as an exigence that required a speech of gratitude. Somehow, as the speech continued to its later half part, the speaker added a new rhetorical situation that might not be expected by the general audience. This imposed rhetorical situation is climate change. When DiCaprio said, “And lastly I just want to say this: Making The Revenant was about man 's relationship to the natural world. A world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history”; he induced the audience to accept climate change as an exigence that occurred at the time and morphed the speech into a deliberative tool. The addition of climate change as another subject in the speech shifted its purpose from an instrument to give positive feeling to a means to induce
Open Document