Bush and Obama’s Addresses to the Arab World: Recontextualizing Stance in Political Discourse

Abstract

The present article compares the stance styles in the two speeches addressed to the Arab World by US Presidents George W. Bush in Abu Dhabi in 2008 and Barack Obama in Cairo in 2009. The main theoretical concepts addressed are stance and recontextualization. Methodologically it combines corpus methodology and discourse pragmatic analysis. Halliday’s (1994) model of stance is adopted in the present study to establish stance categories and degrees of subjectivity. Additionally, co-occurrence with personal pronouns and negation is explored. With regard to the concept of recontextualization, the main argument is that the higher frequency of markers of stance in Obama’s speech, in particular modal verbs and negation and their co-occurrence with first person pronouns, evokes intertextually his predecessor’s speech and stance towards the Arab World, together with commonly held assumptions about the relations between the US and the Arab World. Results show significant differences in the choice and frequency of markers of modality and negation and their co-occurrence with personal pronouns in the two speeches. A different stance style characterizes each speech, with an effort in Obama’s speech to recontextualize and reformulate the predominant discourse and social practice in US foreign policy.