Abstract
During the coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, political discourse was dominated by the language of war as the world’s political leaders saturated their speech with the terminology of war. This article examines some properties of the speech delivered by Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison in the parliament on March 22, 2020. The general framework of the study is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) which investigates how language is used in ideological and social contexts and how it relates to power. The material of the research requires to apply a more specialised tool, namely Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) that examines the relation between language and political agendas and ideology. The study considers the political and ideological contexts of the speech through the entire political process and decision making at the national level as well as the sociopolitical and cognitive aspects of the speech in the parliamentary setting. In particular, attention is paid to the war rhetoric that induces the public to conceptualise the virus as an enemy and thus to present the crisis as a threat to the nation. The article explores language means employed by the speaker to actuali s e rhetorical strategies aimed at justifying his government’s measures taken to manage the crisis. To do this, the research looks into historical, cultural and psychological contexts of the speech as well as its political implicatures. Keywords: political speech; war rhetoric; political discourse; critical discourse analysis; mental models
Highlights
The beginning of the year 2020 unexpectedly brought the major challenge to the world, the novel coronavirus disease
As the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID19 a global pandemic on March 11, the language of war began worldwide to prevail over the language of normality in public discourse in general and political discourse in particular
The methodology for the research has been put forward by Teun van Dijk (1993, 2001, 2005) who sees Critical Discourse Analysis as a multidisciplinary approach that “tries to ‘triangulate’ social issues in terms of a combined study of discursive, cognitive and social dimensions of a problem”. This assumption is true for political discourse, whose analysis should not be restricted to thematic features of text and talk, but should include a systematic reasoning of their contexts in the political process
Summary
The beginning of the year 2020 unexpectedly brought the major challenge to the world, the novel coronavirus disease. The virus has been declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (WHO, 30 January 2020), which caused the World Health Organization (WHO) to urge the countries to be “as aggressive as possible” in fighting COVID-19, the world’s “public enemy number one” (Balibouse, Feb 11, 2020). As the WHO declared COVID19 a global pandemic on March 11, the language of war began worldwide to prevail over the language of normality in public discourse in general and political discourse in particular.
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