Language, Power, and Ideology: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Speeches
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Abstract
This qualitative study examines how political language constructs ideology, legitimizes authority, and organizes public interpretation through a corpus of fourteen English-language public political speech transcripts produced between 2016 and 2021. The corpus includes coded governmental addresses, parliamentary speeches, electoral communication, crisis statements, public-health addresses, rights-and-inclusion speeches, democratic-accountability speeches, and international forum speeches. The main article identifies speakers by institutional speech codes, so the analysis foregrounds discourse structures rather than individual political personalities. The study uses Critical Discourse Analysis to connect textual patterns with discourse practice and socio-political context. Its analytical framework integrates Fairclough's three-dimensional model with van Dijk's socio-cognitive approach and draws on discourse-historical analysis, social actor representation, legitimation theory, and critical metaphor analysis. The analysis examines lexical selection, inclusive and exclusive pronouns, modality, transitivity, metaphorical framing, repetition, presupposition, and ideological categorization of social actors. Four dimensions organize the findings: ideological framing, identity construction, legitimization strategies, and in-group/out-group representation. The analysis shows that political authority is discursively legitimized through crisis-and-renewal frames, collective pronoun alignment, moralized representations of responsibility, and strategic boundary-making between citizens, institutions, opponents, threats, and victims. Negative and contrasting cases show that political speeches can also soften conflict, repair legitimacy, or reduce personalization of blame. The study contributes an evidence-linked Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) framework for tracing how textual forms become ideological resources when interpreted through discourse practice and socio-political context.
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