International Journal of Language & Literature

Critical Discourse Analysis of the Political Speech of the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, at the New Suez Canal Inauguration Ceremony
Dr. Inas Hussein

Abstract
This paper focuses on employing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in studying Arabic political discourse. The objective of the study was to explore the intended ideologies and the critical linguistic aspects in the political speech delivered by the Egyptian President, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, at the New Suez Canal inauguration ceremony on 6th August, 2015. The paper put these themes in their social and cultural contexts, with a focus on the lexicon used. The speech has been taken from the Internet. In order to achieve the main goal of the study, CDA was used as a theoretical framework to analyze the speech. The analysis of the obtained data was conducted by drawing upon Fair Clough’s three-dimensional model of CDA; namely, the language text, whether spoken or written, discourse practice and socio-cultural practices. Both macro analysis (semantic macrostructures) and micro analysis (local semantics) were conducted in an attempt to link social and linguistic practices. The results of the study revealed that this speech has its distinctive features and that language was used tactfully to arrive at the intended goals of the speaker. Semantic phenomena such as figures of speech, repetition, synonymy and collocation are widely employed in the speech of the Egyptian president to achieve different political ideologies.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v4n1a10