Assess graduate-level ability to design and execute a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of contemporary political speeches: formulating research questions, compiling balanced corpora, applying quantitative (frequency, keyness, collocation, n-grams) and qualitative (concordance, semantic prosody, metaphor, agency) techniques to detect ideological framing and lexical persuasion strategies (euphemism, nominalization, intensification, passivization), interpreting findings within socio-political contexts, and addressing methodological validity, triangulation, and ethical considerations in reporting results.