Repetition in Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Selected Speeches Against Social Injustice: A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.015 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".