Still The United States of America? A Critical Discourse Analysis

Discourses both reflect and reproduce social relations and political speeches are believed by scholars to be discourses from governmental authorities and since these governmental authorities have the power to change the fate of nations investigating their discourse is of utmost importance, both to understand how they manipulate social events to their interest and to understand the underlying and hidden realities of the society that is reflected by the discourse. Critical Discourse Analysis trying to unravel the out-of-sight norms and values hidden in the text to address social inequalities is a flourishing subject of study. Given the significant role of the United States in events all around the globe, understanding how the U.S. Senators, the country’s upper chamber of Congress, see, understand, and respond to one of the most important crises of 2022 is of vital importance. This paper tries to unravel the hidden values and ideologies behind the language that the U.S. Senators have used in their tweets about the Russo-Ukrainian War, exploring the discourses of the Senate Democratic Caucus and House Republican Senators, the nation’s two major parties, regarding the Russo-Ukrainian War and then compare them together to find out any probable differences and explain the reason for the probable differences. Twitter’s Advance Search Engine has been used to extract the required data and Corpus Linguistics tools and Fairclough’s Dialectical-Relational Approach has been implemented to carry out this study. This mixed method study has found that even though both parties agree on some general issues regarding the above-mentioned topic they show great differences in their discourses. This paper shows that democrats tend to use a more soft and lofty language, to sugar-coat and do not use threatening language while quite contrary republicans tend to use more explicit, direct language with a theme of masculinity. Several limitations were recognized when doing this study which can be sources for further studies.