Person Deixis as Biased Political Pronouns in George W. Bush’s Speeches on Iraqi War II

Abstract

Misrepresentation and manipulation in discourse can be weapons of mass deception. As politicians rely on language as their tool of trade, language users may opt for a language game to achieve their political ends. This is, in fact, the objective of the present study that focuses on the manipulation of person deixis in political discourse. The current research paper sheds light on the perception of Arabs and Muslims from a western perspective. More specifically, the speeches of George W. Bush, delivered between March 2003 and June 2004, and related to Iraqi War II, are analyzed within Fairclough's socio-cultural approach to CDA. The results of this study show that the use of political pronouns in G. W Bush's speeches reflects a WE\THEY dichotomy that divides the referents into pro-US and anti-US groups. The selection of pronouns distorts the truth and misrepresents the referents by allocating negative\pejorative words to them and categorizing them as proliferators of weapons of mass destruction. This research analyzes political pronouns in discourse within the framework of CDA and explains how person deixis is used in a language game to deceive public opinion.