Shifts, voices and positionings in political discourse: A comparative analysis of creating allies and enemies through linguistic choices

This dissertation presents a sociolinguistic analysis of political discourse, focusing especially on the various linguistic forms that are recruited by social actors---political leaders---to service their political ideology. Using an analysis of voicing (Bakhtin 1981, 1986), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Functional Grammar (FG), I present evidence of the sociolinguistic functions engineered by the choice of linguistic forms used by three political leaders: Spanish-speaking Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro of Latin America and English-speaking George W. Bush of North America. I use Koven's model (2002, 2007) to explain how politicians position themselves ideologically in the discourse creating alignments and misalignments with other social actors. This sociolinguistic analysis yields generalizations of convergence and divergence of form-function mapping among the three leaders, generating a typology of discourse strategies manifest in political discourses of "Othering.";My study presents a comparative analysis of different politicians from different cultures, languages and ideologies, which contributes to a better understanding of the use of language by political actors to pursue different goals.;The present study fills the gap in the literature proposing, from an interdisciplinary combination of methods, a text analysis that relates lexical items, forms and structures with specific voices and ideological alignments. Furthermore, this dissertation contributes to the sparse literature of analysis of political discourses in a language other than English.;Finally, this study reveals ways in which politicians display their ideology and (ab)use power to manipulate audiences through the political message.