Political Discourse Analysis (PDA): Obama’s remarks about the warfare in Syria 2013

ABSTRACT

The 2013 Syrian warfare has already become a critical issue for almost all social media, organizations, and people with various backgrounds. As the results, many controversial opinions are presented to achieve different goals as well as the creation of political discourses.

But it was the task of political discourse analysis to uncover that phenomenon especially on what the president Barrack Obama addressed. Through the theoretical frameworks of political discourse structures of Van Dijk, this study finally revealed that Topics, Schemata, Local Meanings, Lexical C hoices, S yntax, and Rhetorical Devices are used by the speaker as a means of doing politics.

Topics are global meanings which the speaker shared to listeners such as the use of chemical weapons, a crime against humanity, security threats, and self- representation. Schemata is a layout organized by the speaker to pursue a close relationship with addressee, tell the past, present, and future situations, describe US in positive but THEM in negative, promote beneficial resolutions, and unite all audiences with the guidance of God. Local Meanings are meanings established by the speaker to tell the addressee about the background of the warfare in S yria, its details, the speaker’s objectives in the name of law, humanity, security support, economy, education, liberation, political settlement and idealism. Furthermore, these local meanings contributed to the comparison of US, OUR (group, people, troops, allies, organizations) and THEM, THEIR (group, people, actors, allies, organizations).Lexicons mitigated a negative impression upon US and increase negative outlook for THEM. Syntactical Preference represented the distance between the speaker and the addressee in terms of values, knowledge, social status, authority, belief, and hopes. Besides, it also hid the agency roles and explains causality, disclaimer, parallelism, counterfactuals, negation of actors, actions, or items. Meanwhile, R hetorical Devices were strategically to tell possibility/impossibility, show the speaker’s solidarity, oneness, nationality, commitment and ability, to evoke emotion and manipulate the truth.

To sum up, these political discourse structures have at least helped the speaker to communicate and transact with part icipants including pro addressee, counter addressee and para-addressee in practicing a discursive strategy by following the square of ideological framework US and THEM representation.