Rhetorical Moves of Kenyan Parliamentary Committee Reports

Numerous studies have been carried out on move analysis in academic and scientific settings. However, scarcely any studies have been done on parliamentary discourse, especially on structural and rhetorical organization of Parliamentary Committee Reports. Indeed, most research on parliamentary genres has been concentrated on European parliaments with little study done on African parliaments. Consequently, this study sought to analyze the rhetorical moves of selected Kenyan Parliamentary Committee Reports (PCRs) using a genre-based approach. The study uncovers the rhetorical moves used in parliamentary reports in order to achieve their communicative purpose. It involves a survey of generic conventions and overall schematic move structure of PCRs. Descriptive research design was adopted in the study while the corpora was generated from fifteen Kenyan parliamentary committee reports sampled five each from selected County Assemblies, the National Assembly and the Senate. Findings from the study indicate that delivery of arguments in PCRs employs a rhetorical strategy combining rhetorical moves geared at informing, convincing and persuading legislators. The study has identified a distinctive realization of moves in PCRs which include Preface, Introduction, Method, Results and Recommendation (PIMRaR). Ultimately, this study contributes to the existing pool of knowledge on genre and move analysis.