A Critical Discourse Analysis of SelectedAmerican Political Tweets

Abstract

Recently, the world has witnessed the war between Russia and Ukraine, which has represented a direct  challenge to international rule of law and  stability of the international system. Thus, it has led to different types of political tweets among which those of American president Mr. Biden. He has started a new type of media war on twitter, accusing Russia and hold them the responsibility for what is happening recently in Ukraine. This raise in the use of political tweets give increase to some controversies over their ideologies and the linguistic strategies employed to convey these ideologies. This creates an obvious need to critically investigate these tweets to find out these ideologies and strategies. The current study is based on the hypotheses that American political tweets depend heavily on linguistic devices to convey their intended messages, claiming that tweets can convey the intentions of the president in such crisis.

The aims of this study, which are finding out the linguistic elements, exploring the ideologies conveyed by tweets, and verifying its hypotheses, two types of procedures  have been adopted: theoretical and practical. The theoretical procedures consist of presenting a theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis  “CDA”, including its principles, aims, approaches, model of analysis, and some related previous studies. On the other hand, the practical procedures consist of selecting three tweets. Three tweets are selected from the personal  account of the   president of the United State Joe Biden which are selected from his personal account on twitter.The selected tweets have been analyzed in  the light of the adopted model based on Fairclough (1989).The results of selected tweets have shown that American tweets aim to accuse Russia and stand with Ukraine in this war. In addition, these tweets aim to motivate the other countries to stand and support Ukraine in this crisis.