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Abstract
This paper is intended to show how a single reality, that is the continuation of war in Iraq by the American troops, is presented and viewed by the two major American political parties' (Republican and Democratic) candidates of the US presidential primaries of 2008.
In this study, van Dijk's (2004) framework adopted from Politics, ideology and discourse is used to detect discursive structures within the transcripts of the candidates' speeches and discover the ideologies underlying them. The macro strategies of 'positive self-representation' and 'negative other- representation' (which are intimately tied up with 'Polarization' of in group vs. out group ideologies or US-THEM) plus the other 25 more subtle strategies have turned out to be very accurate criteria for the evaluation of attitudes, and opinions. The findings of this study can be conducive to expanding readers' critical thinking abilities in comprehension and production of language.
Key words: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA); Political discourse.
Introduction
Like a coroner's office where a dead body, unable to speak, is dissected for the purpose of discovering the cause of death, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is the right place to perform an autopsy on the discourse, spoken or written, in order to find out about the ideologies underlying it. In fact, CDA, as an important branch of Discourse Analysis (DA), tries to focus on relations between ways of talking and ways of thinking, and highlights "the traces of cultural and ideological meaning in spoken and written texts" (O'Halloran 2005: 1946). CDA broadens the scope of linguistic analysis. It includes the larger sociopolitical and socio-cultural contexts within which discourse is embedded, as it is at this macro-level of analysis that we are able to unpack the ideological bases of discourse that have become naturalized overtime and are treated as common sense, acceptable and natural features of discourse (Fairclough 1995).
There are different fields and topics which invite CDA to perform its valuable job, however, if there is one social field that is most fitting here, it is that of politics. Demonstrations, parliaments, presidential campaigns and political debates are all the fields of ideological battles. This is not surprising because, as van Dijk (2004) contends, "it is eminently here that different and opposed groups, power, struggle and interests are at stake....