Obama’s speech in Cairo “new beginning” : a critical discourse analysis study

الملخص EN

The paper is a linguistic study for president Obama's “historical” speech in Cairo (2009) to mainly find out how language is used as part of the president's attempt to draw a new position and identity for America in the global community in general and in the Islamic community in particular, as one of the strategies that goes in conformity with the well-known slogan of “change” in his presidential election campaign.

It can be noticed that Obama administration came to power with a different discourse to the whole global community to supposedly start a new era of “peace” and “consent” expressed through different use of language, away of the discourse of “coercion” during the eight years of the former administration Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is the field where the social factor plays an essential role in determining the individual's meanings and intentions when using a language.

This means that different social and individual elements have become part of producing, reproducing, interpreting and / or analyzing any discourse and, thus, of CDA studies.

Norman Fairleigh is one of the prominent figures who has contributed to the CDA field most significantly ; he believes that the language is an irreducible part of social life and refers to a dialectic relation between language and social reality, which can be realized through social events (texts), social practices (orders of discourse) and social structures.

The main aim of the paper is to discover how Obama utilized the language to present his new ideology associated with his strategy of “change” in order to draw a new position for America in relation to the global community, and the Islamic community in particular.

This ideology as well as his new assumptions and values are, in most cases, hidden behind the wording, structure and metaphor used in the speech.

The procedure followed for the analysis of the speech is Norman Furloughs model part of the “text–interaction–context” approach introduced in his book Language and power (2001) which is an interdisciplinary approach that deals with the text on different levels.

On the “textual” level only, Fairleigh provided a model of ten questions to find out the text's formal properties which are supposed to imply the speaker's ideologies and values, inter alia.

Two main reasons for choosing this model are its being highly structured and analytically so comprehensive.

For the purpose of this study as the implied meanings are essentially concentrated on, only the first seven questions are applicable and considered most relevant ; the last three questions ( 8, 9, 10) are seen to be irrelevant due to their focus more on the grammatical relations “cohesion” than on the meanings behind.

Questions (1, 2, 3) concern the experiential, relational, and expressive values of the lexical features of the text respectively ; question 4 is designed to deal with metaphor only ; whereas questions (5, 6, 7) concern the experiential, relational, and expressive values of the grammatical features of the text respectively.

It is concluded that language has generally been greatly utilized to achieve Obama's targets of which a crucial and most important is to show his “clear” and “plain” intentions of peace towards all the global communities and the Islamic one in particular.

Through this personal discourse the president employed a lot of devices including both his own “experiential” understandings so as to supposedly set a new ideology in the world and a new “expressive” comprehension for the human reality.

This ideology suggests new shared principles of “partnership” in the relations among countries.

The new “relational” values are assumed to be newly-modeled on the basis of building a world full of peace, where America has its new position functioning as a “partner” rather than a “patron” with the other peace-makers of whom the Islamic community is to be an essential part.