A Political Discourse Analysis of the Speeches of President Obama and Prime Minister Gillani

Abstract

This paper examines the discourse of the two political speeches made by the Pakistan Premier Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani and the US President Barack Obama after the elimination of Osama Bin Laden on May 3, 2011. The objective of this analysis is to discover and explicate how ideology is established and unveiled by the use of language. For the stated purpose, the framework of this study draws on Halliday’s model of transitivity (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) through which we aim to investigate the transitivity choices employed by the individual speakers, the participant roles (Hasan, 1985) assigned to the enemy and the pronoun choices (Butt et. al., 2004) made by the two speakers in order to reveal a particular socio-political stance disseminated through the two speeches in two cultures: of the USA and Pakistan. The findings indicate that linguistic choices in transitivity play a fundamental role in conveying of implicit and dominant ideologies.

Keywords

• Discourse
• Ideology
• Political Speeches
• Socio-Political Stance
• Transitivity