POLITICAL DISCOURSE – IDEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF G.W. BUSH’S SPEECHES
POLITICAL DISCOURSE – IDEOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF G.W. BUSH’S SPEECHES

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the ideological analysis of G.W. Bush’s political speeches delivered during the war in Iraq. The speeches were analyzed as a sort of political discourse with the purpose of recognizing lexical, semantic, rhetorical and grammatical structures used in the strategy of polarization when representing the actions of two confronted parties – Iraqi regime and American military. Polarization strategy is one of the basic principles of the T.van Dijk’s Critical discourse analysis, which is expressed through ideological square. This means that in a kind of political discourse, as these speeches are, in which the interests of two confronted states, ideologies, nations etc. are presented, we can expect good actions of in-group to be emphasized and bad ones to be mitigated, whereas the good actions of out-group will be mitigated and bad ones will be emphasized. Critical discourse analysis offers the basic tools for recognizing such structures in different discourses, but in these political speeches it questions the function and influence which these structures have on Bush’s political plan and on society as a whole.

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