‘BENEFICIARY’ AS A MEANS FOR A DICHOTOMOUS REPRESENTATION IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Vol.10,No.1(2017)
This paper focuses on the employment of the participant role ‘Beneficiary: Recipient’ in
the discourse of U.S. President George W. Bush in the period from September 11, 2001
to May 1, 2003. The analysis presented in the paper has been conducted on the corpus of
92 speeches delivered by the speaker. The aim of the paper is to observe the formation of
the ‘Us’ and ‘Them’groups on the basis of the involvement of the participant ‘Beneficiary:
Recipient’. The theoretical framework for the analysis is grounded in the system of
transitivity developed by M. A. K. Halliday. In the analytical part, the focus will be placed
on the analysis of the participant ‘Beneficiary: Recipient’ that is involved in Material
processes in George W. Bush’s discourse. It will be argued that the employment of this
participant also contributed to positive presentation of ‘Us’ and to negative presentation
of ‘Them’.
beneficiary; transitivity; material process; political speech; George W. Bush
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