A Tale of Two Revolutions: A Discourse Historical Analysis (DHA) of Selected Political Speeches during the Arab Spring of the Egyptian and Lebanese Revolutions

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Department of English, School of Linguistics and Translation, Badr University in Cairo (BUC), Egypt.

Abstract

Historians alone do not write history as the main contributor is the politician who reconstitutes political events via discourse. Discourse per se can be regarded as an argumentation scheme where the politician attempts to convince the masses of a standpoint or urge them to make a certain decision. The political discourse released during the Egyptian and the Lebanese Revolutions form arguments which demonstrate the role of politicians in writing history. The Discourse Historical Analysis (DHA) model by Reisigl and Wodak (2001) facilitates the investigation of selected speeches for the former Egyptian President, Mubarak, and the former Lebanese Prime Minister, Hariri, to examine the discursive strategies used by these politicians. The study also explores their fallacious arguments and the shared discursive patterns in writing the history of these two major events. The study concludes that Egyptian and Lebanese politicians rely on the fallacies of ad misericordiam, ad baculum, and ad verecundiam to construct the US/THEM dichotomy.

Keywords

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics