The ‘Jasmine Revolt’ has made the ‘Arab Spring’: A critical discourse analysis of the last three political speeches of the ousted president of Tunisia

Abstract

The current article addresses person deixis in the last three speeches of the ousted president of Tunisia (OPT) from the perspectives of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and cognitive-pragmatics. It takes deixis to be individuated in the ‘indexical field’ by the deictic center, who fills them from within the social field at his/her discretion with ‘social roles’. The way the filling takes place is a function of social proximity to or distance from the deictic center, which manipulates the constructed categories either closer to the CENTER or to the PERIPHERY of the image schema. In particular, it is argued that the OPT as a deictic center has constructed in the first two speeches two deictic categories, which would be called ‘wandering WE’ after and a peripheral THEY, through which he tried to maintain the political status quo and blame responsibility for the events on others. However, in the last speech, the OPT constructed two indexical dyads, namely I-YOU and WE-THEY. This shift is explained as an effort on the part of OPT to reproduce social power abuse, dominance, and inequality by way of making political concessions. Despite this, the shift is not felt to have created communality and closeness with the addressees since the policy of exclusion, authority, and domination precluded these concessions from being persuasive enough for the ‘Jasmine Revolt’ in Tunisia not to resist this power and go for regime change.

The Realization of Impoliteness in Arguments between the Democrats and Republicans over the Government Shutdown Issue in the US

“…As Culpeper (2013) argues, theoretically speaking, many theories, specifically in interactional sociolinguistics and pragmatics, are aimed at studying socially cooperative interactions and have given inadequate attention to anti-social ones; however, such interactions are worth studying in that, for example, impoliteness, contrary to being generally assumed as the repugnant part of language, is indeed often creative. In recent years, research within the framework of '(im)politeness' has been enriched in many areas of interest (see Jamet and Jobert 2013) and, of course, in different political genres (e.g., P`erez de Ayala 2001, Garcia-Pastor 2002, Bolívar 2005, Harris, Grainger and Mullany 2006, Maalej 2012, Toddington 2015. Although studies of impoliteness have been carried out on a variety of discourses (e.g., Homles and Schnurr 2005, Lorenzo-Dus 2009, Murphy 2014, Mirhosseini, Mardanshahi and Dowlatabadi 2017, de Marlangeon 2018, there still seems to be an insufficient amount of impoliteness research on political discourse.…”

What Lies Underneath a Political Speech?: Critical Discourse Analysis of Thai PM’s Political Speeches Aired on the TV Programme Returning Happiness to the People

“…Rather than trying to capture people's heart, their speeches may inject dominant ideology, to order, justify and legalize their policies, which may have been articulated as a discursive practice to convince a target audience (Maalej 2012). As a result, certain lexical structures and linguistic strategies may have been embedded in their speeches to justify the necessity of their commands and simultaneously establish a good image among common people.…”

Conflict, Exclusion and Dissent in the Linguistic Landscape

“…In fact, his speeches in all his 23 years of rule were all in Standard Arabic, a factor that is believed to have contributed to his inability to reach people. Only during what will become his last speech, in an effort to connect, did he use Tunisian Arabic (Maalej, 2012). Second, English still remains a remote third language in terms of usage in the Tunisian linguistic repertoire and even its use on street signs remains restricted to business and commodification purposes (Ben Said, 2011).…”

“…His replies are both verbal and non-verbal. In his speeches, he acknowledged the subject position ascribed to him and responded with increasing leniency and shakiness as more people and places joined in the protests (Maalej, 2012). In a famous line from his final speech of January 13, 2011, he responded to the continued wave of protests that kept spreading around the country by repeating 'I understood you.…”

“…Al Masaeed (2013) explored, from a critical discourse analysis perspective, the Egyptian slogans that developed during this period. Maalej (2012), for his part, studied the language of the three final speeches of the ousted Tunisian president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, focusing on indexicality and personal pronouns in particular, while Makar (2011) examined the use of humor in the demonstrations of the Egyptian revolution. Kasanga and Ben Said (forthcoming) studied the discourse of protests from Tunisia, Egypt and the Democratic Republic of Congo with a particular focus on frames of identity, intertextuality and interdiscursivity as they play out in mobile or 'nonfixed' protest signs.…”