Repetition in Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Selected Speeches Against Social Injustice: A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis

This paper conducts a contrastive critical discourse analysis to examine the role of repetition in selected speeches delivered by Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) and Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) against social injustice. The study aims to examine repetition as a rhetorical and linguistic device through a contrastive lens, presenting its divergent usage and impact on framing these significant speeches. Along with this, the study tries to highlight the underpinning ideologies through the used types of repetition. By adopting Cockcroft and Cockcroft’s (2014) framework and by following a mixed method of research analysis, the study has found that RFK’s speeches employ certain types of repetition, namely, random repletion, initial repetition, stop-and-start, and full circle so that to emphasise key points, ideas, actions in order to make the speeches memorable and give them variety as well as to impact emotions. Concerning MLK’s speeches, the study has found that repetition, through its various types, is used to emphasise and to ensure key messages about social injustice and allow the audience to reinforce these messages. The study has also revealed that types of repetition are interrelated and could be used interchangeably; thus, a repeated phrase of initial repetition could be repeated in random, stop-and-start, full-circle types. It has been identified that repetition is a powerful device in uncovering ideology, by repeating certain words, phrases, ideologies become apparent. Accordingly, RFK’s ideologies are: social justice, liberalism and democracy, resistance and humanitarianism, while, MLK’s ideologies are: progress and change, non-violence and justice, civil rights and racial equality.