The Impact of George W. Bush's Political Discourses on the Invasion of Iraq: A Corpus-Based Rhetoric Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Through political speeches, the use of language plays an important role in shaping the political goals and activities of politicians. Political speeches have gained a lot of attention in recent years as a result of media coverage, and they have sparked a lot of curiosity. Manipulative language usage allows the speaker to exert influence over others without their will, with the control focusing on the recipients' verbal contributions to the conversation and cognitive processes of reception and interpretation. The current research looked at power dynamics in President Bush's speeches, concentrating on semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic manipulation levels, as well as the impact on the receivers' mental models. In this study, the researcher used Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics to take a close look at George W. Bush's political discourses on the 2003 Iraq War. To accomplish this goal, Ten G.W. Bush interviews and speeches were gathered from various sources. Using Halliday's systemic functional linguistics as the analytical framework, discursive techniques, power relations, hidden meanings beneath the vocabulary, and the structures employed in the speeches were extracted and developed on. The study concentrated on the linguistic choices made only within three functions or meanings of the Hallidayan model. As a result, passive and active voices, nominalizations and emotive language within the ideational meaning, modality within the interpersonal meaning, and thematization (or theme development) throughout textual meaning were chosen to be analyzed in President Bush's comments about the Invasion of Iraq. Following the investigation, the researcher concluded that George W. Bush had manipulated the above-mentioned language traits. He had used these language methods in his favour and against the Iraqi people and Saddam Hussein, the country's president at that time. Furthermore, language research indicated that the previous US president made every effort to convey his country's superiority and hegemony.