A Critical Discourse Analysis of social Actor’s Representation on Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad’s Speech at The United Nations

ABSTRACT

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has become a very influential academic research activity among subjects in political, social, educational, and linguistic sciences. It sees language as social practice. It also examines ideological manipulations and power relation used among people manifested in texts. Furthermore, it is always interesting to investigate an influential politician’s way
to use exclusion and inclusion strategy through his political discourse. This research is an attempt to explain the research problem of how Ahmadinejad, as the Iranian president, represent social actor within the ongoing phenomena in the international forum’s speech. I decided to choose his speech at the United Nations General Assembly in 2010 in New York.

To answer the problems, I use van Leeuwen's CDA framework of social actor’s representation through exclusion and inclusion strategy leading to ideological based domination and hegemony in the texts. Methodologically, I use descriptive qualitative study as my research design. The data are collected by intensive reading to find out the aspects of discourse.

The analysis found some findings covering the formulated research question. The findings reveal that Ahmadinejad uses the inclusion to strengthen Moslem’s society as the colonized people and their ideologies as well and to downgrade the power and authority of Israel and some Western states showing the intention of the colonized people to dominate and marginalize US and its Allies. In the strategy of exclusion, he uses the strategies of passivation, nominalization, and the use of clause meanwhile in the strategy of inclusion he uses differentiation, objectivation-abtraction, identification, determination, assimilation, and association-disassociation. Therefore, this study is in line with van Leeuwen’s theory of social actor’s representation which is mainly made up from exclusion and inclusion.

Based on the findings mentioned above, I suggest the next researchers to focus on discussing common and effective strategies revealed in the present study such as nominalization-categorization in the political discourse and the more inclusion strategy.