Abstract
The Postmodern wave of democratization and the emphasis on democratic values and right to expression make it imperative that the political discourse be studied with more and full attention. In this regard, one genre that is almost totally ignored in Pakistani context and little attention has been paid to it even at the global level, is autobiography. Autobiography is a special kind of composition in which the author gives a picture of the evolution of the self and its relation with the external world throughout this evolutionary process. The famous political autobiography Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela is, therefore, selected as the basic unit of analysis. Through content analysis different topics are separated from the original text. These topics are then grouped under different categories of van Dijk’s theory of Political Discourse Analysis (PDA). The exploration and analysis of linguistic devices are also carried out. Besides Van Dijk’s PDA, Huckin’s approach to text and Corpus Linguistics’ quantitative methodology aided the systematic in-depth analysis. Methods of both qualitative and quantitative research have been utilized for this study as the researchers believe that quantification of data along with qualitative description produce reliable results. Findings revealed various linguistic devices are used in abundance. Amongst the most prominent ones are the unique and effective use of the year-statistics, language of the minority regime, Afrikaans, Trilingual combination, dramatic language and listing or cluster of three to stress certain themes like racial discrimination, inequality, poverty, parties, law, justice, separation and history.
Highlights
1.1 Language, Discourse and Discourse AnalysisLanguage, one of the distinguishing features of Homo sapiens has been the subject of study during the modern and postmodern eras but it goes back into the pages of ancient history to Panini and Greek scholars
The famous political autobiography Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela is, selected as the basic unit of analysis
Findings revealed various linguistic devices are used in abundance
Summary
One of the distinguishing features of Homo sapiens has been the subject of study during the modern and postmodern eras but it goes back into the pages of ancient history to Panini and Greek scholars. With the passage of time man devised different methods to convey his message in a clear way, manipulating at the same time the language for his own special purpose He emphasized or deemphasized certain topics or themes, that is, recurrently occurring topics. Discourse analysis is defined by Crystal (1994) as the study of continuous stretches of language longer than a single sentence It is called discourse linguistics and specially investigates the organization of such general notions as conversations, arguments, narratives, jokes, ijel.ccsenet.org. Van Dijk (2015) defines critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in social and political context. Critical discourse analysts take explicit position, and want to understand, expose, and resist social inequality
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