Critical Discourse Analysis of Derogation and Euphemization on Pope Benedict XVI’ S Speech

ABSTRACT

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is very important to study. It is relevant for academic research in any subjects such as social, political, educational, and linguistic sciences. It tries to detect social inequality, power and relations embedded in texts used by the powerful people in communication. Thus, it is very interesting to investigate the world leader’s way to set their motivation through texts. We can investigate his way by analyzing the implementation of derogation and euphemization in the texts. In general, derogation is the way to represent the other group in negative other- representation and euphemization is the way to represent the in-group in positive self-representation. This thesis attempts to explain the research questions of how Pope Benedict XVI uses the discursive strategies of derogation and euphemization in the annual forum’s speech.

I use Ruth Wodak’s CDA framework focusing on positive self- representation and negative other- representation to answer the questions. I employ descriptive qualitative study as the research design. I collected the data by reading the data, identifying derogation and euphemization of the data, classifying derogation and euphemization, and analyzing derogation and
euphemization according to Wodak’s framework.

The findings show that Pope Benedict XVI uses the derogation to blame and mitigate the authority and strengths of the out-group member states showing the intention of the in-groups to dominate and marginalize the out- groups. Besides, he employs euphemization to strengthen in-group’s stance and their ideologies as well. In the tactics of derogation and euphemization, he does not use all proposed strategies by Wodak. He uses the referential strategy, predication strategy, argumentation strategy, and mitigation strategy. Pope does not use the perspectivation strategy. He mostly uses the referential strategy as the euphemization. Then, he often employs the predication strategy, argumentation strategy and the intensification strategy as the derogation. Therefore, although this study is in line with Wodak’s theory of positive self-representation and negative other-representation, Pope does not use all proposed strategies by Wodak.

The researcher suggests the next researchers to analyze euphemization and derogation using Wodak’s framework (2001) on newspaper, such as The Djakarta Post or New York Times on its opinion columns since they usually contain binary aspects that are relevant to analyze by Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), particularly derogation and euphemization.