Language as Weapon: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Othering in Trump’s US-Iran War Discourse

Abstract

This research explores the systematic establishment of the Iranian regime as a threatening and illegitimate ‘Other’ in the wartime speeches of the U.S. president and the concurrent portrayal of the U.S. as a righteous nation which God has blessed to uphold the world order. This study adopts mixed-methods design, by using qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis and quantitative word-frequency analysis and is based on a corpus of 7,266 words across four speech genres and based on Van Dijk's (2006) Ideological Square. The analysis reveals four phases in the process of othering: triumphant, threatening, trivializing and absolute, which mirror the increasing military aspects of the conflict. The amount of negative labelling of the out-group rose by approximately five times, from 1.11% to 5.62%, and the dehumanizing expressions grew by nearly ten times throughout the corpus. The study also defines a new legitimizing process ‘the liberation narrative’ that has not been studied extensively in this regard, which is a way of discursively redefining military aggression as 'humanitarian intervention'. The main contribution of this research is the application of Critical Discourse Analysis to Trump's Iran-war discourse in a diachronic approach, rather than a synchronic one, and extending Van Dijk's framework for synchronic analysis to the diachronic one. A critical discourse analysis of wartime discourse reveals that the Othering process is part of how one constructs an in-group in a political discourse. The critical discourse analysis approach shows the Othering process is one of the ways in which an in-group is constructed in a political discourse during wartime.