The Discursive Construction Of Legitimation Of American War On Terrorism

This thesis presents a critical discourse analysis of American anti-terrorism war’slegitimation in four presidential speeches delivered by George W. Bush and BarackObama. Drawing on the theory of discursive legitimation construction developed by vanLeeuwen, a critical discourse analysis scholar, the author identifies four majordiscursive strategies to construct the war legitimation in the collected speeches. Theyinclude: authorization; moral evaluation; rationalization and narrative.With the socio-cognitive approach, in the analysis the author finds that the abovementioned strategies take advantage of the interlocutors’ social cognition to legitimizethe war. To be specific, they are used to select, omit, integrate, reproduce andrecontextualize the interlocutors’ socially shared knowledge to represent warparticipants, war events, war time, and war location in the speeches. These flexiblerepresentations serve to minimize the dissents from the war and lay the foundation andpremise for the war legitimation. The war legimitation is realized in discourse toachieve public manipulation and discourse hegemony because social cognition behindlanguage bridges the gaps not only between orators and target audience but alsodiscourse and social practice.