Analysis of Bush’s Speeches on Iraq War and Terrorism, Based on Chilton’s Emotion Theory
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31150/ajshr.v3i1.1050Keywords:
Political Linguistics, Iraq War, Chilton’s theory, Emotion theoryAbstract
As a subfield of linguistics, Political Linguistics deals with the relationship between language and politics with critical discourse analysis approach. Being aware of the power of language, politicians appeal to the power of linguistic strategies in political discourse to reach their political goals. The present study analyzed five speeches of President Bush, based on Chilton’s (2004) theoretical framework to investigate to what extent and for what purposes Bush applied those theories to his speeches. Investigating the frequency of the other applied theories was the other purpose of the study. The corpus consisted of full transcript of five speeches of Bush delivered on Iraq war and terrorism, from 2001 to 2003, the critical period of Iraq war. Regarding the limitation of space and time, the emotion theory, out of twelve proposed Chilton’s strategies were selected for analyzing the data. The main reason of the application of the applied theory, was legitimizing the Iraq war decision and persuading people to go to war. Analyzing the data revealed that Bush applied emotion theory, to arouse war-related feelings in people and consequently control their decision making.
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