Discursive strategies used by Tony Blair and Christoper Hitchens in “Be it Resolved, Religion is a Force For Good in The World?” Debate

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 what and how Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens used the discursive strategies of derogation and euphemization in the debate.

I used teun A van dijk’s CDA framework focusing on positive self- representation and negative other- representation to answer the questions. I employed descriptive qualitative study as the research design. I collected the data by reading the data, identified derogation and euphemization of the data, classified derogation and euphemization, and analyzed derogation and euphemization by discursive strategies according to van dijk framework.

The findings show that Tony Blair and Christopher Hitchens used the discursive strategies of derogation and euphemish based on van dijk theory. The using derogation to mitigate the authority of the out-group in contrast euphemism used to strengten the in-group representation. They used some discursive strategies like actor description, number game, hyperbole, humanitarianism, illustration, authority, polarization, disclaimer, national self glorification, and evidentially to derogate and euphemism their own group.

I suggest the next researchers to analyze euphemization and derogation using van dijk’s framework (2001) on debate or newspaper, such as political debate. Or news paper in The Jakarta 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.