Discourse of Conflict as Political Genre

Abstract

This dissertation approaches the discourse of conflict as a cluster of conventionalized goal-oriented discursive forms, which inherently links it theoretically with the linguistic scholarship on genres in communication and, in particular, with the most recent theoretical developments in this domain that advocate the need to seek perspectives capable of grasping novel and/or constantly evolving structures of political communication (cf. Cap and Okulska 2013). For these purposes, in this research I list and analyze specific and (more or less) stable structural, content-related and functional characteristics of the Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s speeches discourse about – and in the context of – the Middle East conflict as typical for political genres and, thus, as features that enable to classify, analyze and interpret this discourse as a (potentially new) genre in political communication. Also, this entails that in my study I take these regularities as constitutive of a potentially new generic category in political communication, which is oriented at achieving specific goals in the context of this conflict. In consequence, this research project has strong foundations in Critical Discourse Studies, linguistic pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, and entails a critical perspective on the ‘micro’ considerations of the cognitive-pragmatic properties of the (Israeli political) discourse of conflict, and the ‘macro’ considerations of the larger social motivations and consequences (cf. Fairclough 1995; van Dijk 2001; Wodak and Chilton 2005; Wodak and Meyer 2009) behind producing and negotiating specific conflict-related meanings in various settings.