Transitivity Analysis of Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address From the Perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar

Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar provides a new perspective and method for political discourse analysis. This paper first introduces the research status of political discourse at home and abroad, and then elaborates three metafunctions of Systemic Functional Grammar, namely ideational function, interpersonal function as well as textual function. On this basis, this paper makes an in-depth transitivity analysis of the inaugural address of the 46th president of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden. Through profound research, this paper attempts to reveal how English language is applied to hide ideology in political speeches and how president Joe Biden uses various language features to persuade and inspire American people in order to reach his political purpose; at the same time, it also verifies the practicability of Systemic Functional Grammar in the analysis of political speech discourse.

Understanding the Reasons for Transition from Iranian Constitutional State to Authoritarian State: an Analysis in the Framework of Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory

Throughout the history, the formation of the constitutional state has been the first experience of the modern state in Iran. The change in power relations and the restriction of authoritarian power were among the most important issues of constitutional state. The current study aims at investigating the reasons for transition from Constitutional state to an authoritarian bureaucratic state by adopting Laclau and Mouffe’s framework to political discourse analysis. Research methodology is descriptive-analytical conducted by library–based data. The results showed that the constitutional revolution transformed the power structure and traditional state, but the constitutional revolution failed to create a new order. Despite legal provisions such as the formation of the parliamentary system and the constitution, the constitutional state was unable to exercise its legal power. The co-existence of traditional and reactionary components such as the Khānins, tribal leaders, tribal populations and owners in line with modern elements, intellectuals and the heterogeneity of the ruling political elites made the constitutional revolution incapable of producing profound politico-social changes. As a result, a number of internal and external factors such as financial crisis, tribal power, the imperialist treaty of 1907,disillusionment of political elites, the formation of centrifugal forces, insecurity and global chaos and development of neighboring countries, diversity of ideological in line with geopolitical points of view have been the most important factors in the transition to the authoritarian bureaucratic state of Pahlavi and the failure of the nation – building process and the collapse of politico-constitutional system in Iran.

SERBIAN NATIONAL CULTURE IN POLITICAL TALK OF GOVERNMENT

In this paper we will analyse treatment of Serbian national culture in public speeches and authorised texts of the politicians in power in Serbia. We will adopt political discourse analysis and general text analysis in order to detect modalities of usage of national cultural and messages within studied texts and speeches. Key politicians in the period 2012-2020 are actual President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, who is also leader of Serbian Progressive Party (SPP), Parliament Speaker Ivica Dačić, leader of the Serbian Socialist Party (SSP) and Ana Brnabić, Prime Minister of Serbia, member of SPP. Mentioned three politicians, generally have two attitudes to national culture in examined period. Inaugural speeches, greetings on special occasions and state holidays, elec-tions speeches, public speeches on crucial political issues like on the status of Kos-ovo and Metohija present raw data.

Strategic functions of linguistic impoliteness in US primary election debates

Since presidential primary debates in US election campaigns serve the function of identifying the most promising nominee for the subsequent presidency, they constitute a highly adversarial multilogue. Debaters do not only exchange factual arguments but also use diverse forms of impoliteness geared towards damaging the public image of political opponents and persuading audiences to vote accordingly. Combining political discourse analysis with pragmatic approaches to impoliteness, this paper examines the ways in which verbal aggression in debates inflicts damage on the addressee’s positive and negative face. On the basis of five Democratic and five Republican debates from 2016, it is shown that impolite utterances fulfil the four central strategic functions of (a) delegitimization, (b) coercion, (c) entertainment, and (d) (self-)defence, all of which support the macro-function of political persuasion through the construction of personal preferability.

Repressive Political Communication through Legal Products to Preserve Ideology of Jokowi's Government

The fundamental value of democracy is civil liberties to express an opinion, assembly, and organization. Data from various institutions observing Indonesian democracy show that since Jokowi's leadership, Indonesia has had problems with civil liberties, from previously free to partly free, thus falling into the flawed category of democracy. The decline in civil liberties was triggered by the Jokowi administration's repressive political communications manifested in the form of repressive legal products. These repressive legal products are used to suppress critical opposition groups who are at odds with the Jokowi administration. This study uses a critical paradigm based on qualitative methods that utilize the theory of Political Discourse Analysis (PDA). The research objective is to reveal the various repressive legal products of the Jokowi administration as well as to explain the context, history, power, and ideology behind the production of these repressive laws. The object of study related to repressive legal products is limited to online news published by media verified by the Press Council. The results of the study concluded that the Jokowi administration presented repressive legal products to perpetuate power and smooth the implementation of capitalist neoliberal ideology.