Critical Discourse Analysis and Rhetorical Tropes in Donald Trump’s First Speech to the UN

Language and politics go hand in hand and learning and comprehending political genre is to learn a language created for codifying, extending and transmitting political discourse in any text/talk. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Fairclough’s CDA and Rhetoric, the current study aims at investigating Donald Trump’s First Speech, from the point of frequency and functions of some rhetorical strategies (Parallelism, Anaphora and the Power of Three, Antithesis and Expletive, etc.), Nominalization, Passivization, We-groups and Modality as well as Lexical and Textual Analysis, presented to the UN delivered on Sep. 19, 2017. Specifically, the study seeks to determine: (1) how President Trump succeeded in conveying his notions and assumptions to his intended audience, and in convincing and negotiating, (2) how he attempted to explicitly and implicitly pass his attitudes on his targets, and (3) how those orientations, intended notions and assumptions were seamlessly presented to his addressees in discoursal and lexico-grammatical levels; (4) and finally in this underlying trend how he achieved his own ends. The results of the study hope to enhance reading comprehension and writing in academic registers for EFL/ESL students.

Participación política de las mujeres: una mirada desde el lenguaje y el género

Reseña de libro: Shaw, Sylvia. Women, Language and Politics. Cambridge University Press, 2020. 342 págs

A Historical Account of Linguistic Imperialism and Educational Policy in Tunisia: From the independence to the ‘Jasmine Revolution’

This article is about foreign languages hegemony in Tunisia. It describes the linguistic situation at the macro and micro levels, the Tunisian and the international linguistic communities, the status of English and French languages throughout the world, and their effects on the Tunisian educational policy. The prevalence of French in Tunisia as the language of science and technology between 1956 and 1987, the way the value of English is promoted in the Tunisian educational system between 1987 and 2011 though Tunisia is a French colonized country, and the tendency to linguistic isolationism since 2011, prove the intrinsic link between language and politics. Political changes at international and local levels shape the local linguistic communities.

Language and Politics: Prose as a Medium of Societal Apartheid in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

This paper studies the use of prose in Julius Caesar as a tool of political and social apartheid and class discrimination. Usually, Shakespeare assigns blank verse to upper-class characters and prose to lower class ones. The study analyzes three occasions in which prose is used by two patricians and an eloquent cobbler. The paper means to explain the diversion of patricians to prose and add another voice to the already heaping interpretations given in criticism. It argues that the diversion of the two patricians to prose has two functions. Firstly, it shows that prose is indigenous to the poor and the patricians use it when they address the poor or talk about them. Secondly, Shakespeare shows that the diversion of the patricians to prose is a wrong choice and leads to moral depravity or failure of mission. In contrast, the cobbler uses prose effectively because it is indigenous to him and he feels at home using it. The study uses the contextual approach to analyze the three speeches. Keywords: Prose, blank verse, patricians, plebeians, Aristotelian rhetoric, republican politics.