Analysis Of Power Relations In President Bush's State Of The Union Speech

The first aspect that been discussed by Irina Rudyk in “Power Relations in President Bush’s State of the Union speech based on Critical Discourse Analysis is meaning. From this context, Rudyk analyse the choices of vocabulary employed by the speaker which is President Bush. Besides, meaning is also the presupposition on how the listener or the reader interprete the speaker’s speech based on their ideology on a particular matter such as in Bush’s speech, he talked about the enemy and the peacefulness for the sake of American people. In other words, the listener or the reader’s meaning is constructed based on the choices of words used in his speech. According to Rudyk’s analysis, mostly the speech is abound with negative yet expressive value
Rudyk also added that it is the speaker’s common sense assumption in referring to the respected enemy that the speaker intended to. From the speech, it could be understand that the enemy is a group of people from Middle East. A part from that, Rudyk also stated that the listener or reader would also have a similar “common sense assumption” effect from the statement in paragraph which is “Everyone of us wishes that this war were over and won.” According to Rudyk, the speaker does not mention clearly that the sentences The war is over and the war is won (by us) have the same proposition. Besides that, the repetition of the sentences in the speaker’s speech indicate that the speaker is exercising his power in persuading the listener or reader’s meaning system in favor of those who is upper hand in the war. Another example that Rudyk used in order to analyses the meaning system of the Bush’s speech is the closing sentence of paragraph 10,..it remains the policy of this government to use every lawful and proper tool of intelligence,diplomacy, law enforcement, and military action to do our duty, to find these enemies, and to protect the American
Additionally, the sentence also give meaning to the listener or reader that those are specific steps that are lawful and proper. Rudyk also stated that the sentence in the speaker’s speech is actually persuading ideological power towards the listener or reader. Besides, according to Fairclough 2001, p.28, the possession and exercise of power through wining other’s consent to or at least acquiescence in. On the other hand, the speaker also used positive vocabulary to render the above action of the government. Meanwhile, when describing ‘the other’ the speaker used negative vocabulary. For instance, they are killing and terrorizing Americans (paragraph 7); slaughter the innocent (paragraph