Discursive Inclusion and Exclusion of Transgressor(s) in English and Arabic Political Condemnations

Abstract

Political condemnations are expressive illocutionary acts enacted by political actors to publicly denounce and raise awareness of a certain moral transgression(s) committed by particular transgressors(s). The current article aims to cross-culturally investigate the linguistic devices deployed by politicians to include or exclude the identity of the transgressor(s) in selected English and Arabic political condemnation statements and to investigate how political affiliations and disaffiliations of political actors affect and influence the ways social actors are represented in political condemnations. The article mainly draws on Van Leeuwen’s (2008) Social Actor Representation framework to analyze the selected dataset. The study concludes that in both languages, condemners adopt, more or less, similar linguistic devices and discursive strategies to including and excluding of transgressor(s). It was also found that unlike the English statements, whereby implicit inclusion, i.e. backgrounding is utilized, transgressor(s) in the Arabic statements is found to be either included or excluded in the condemnation statements. Moreover, transgressors’ inclusion and exclusion were found to be, to a certain degree, ideologically motivated and deeply affected and mostly demarcated by the relationships between the condemners and the condemned parties on one hand, and between the condemning party and the parties affected by the transgression act(s).