Cover not available
Article published In:
Pragmatics and Society
Vol. 5:1 (2014) ► pp.128–146

Whose face to be saved? Mubarak’s or Egypt’s? A pragma-semantic analysis

The 25th of January, 2011 witnessed a wave of political unrest all over Egypt, with repercussions that have re-shaped the future of contemporary Egypt. For the first time in the modern history of Egypt since the 1952 Nasserite revolution, grass-root protestors went to streets chanting slogans against the military regime headed by the (since then ex-) President of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak. This placed the then regime, as well as its mainstay, the National Democratic Party (NDP), in a political crisis on both local and international scales. It is this critical moment that led Mubarak to give his unprecedented speech on February 1st, 2011. The speech has brought about epoch-making political changes in the history of contemporary Egypt. Under public pressure, two seminal declarations were made in this speech: (1) Mubarak’s intention not to nominate himself for a new presidential term; (2) a call on the Houses of Parliament to amend articles 76 and 77 of the constitution concerning the conditions on running for presidency and the period for the presidential term in Egypt. The present paper seeks to answer the following overarching question: what are the discursive strategies used for saving the political face of Mubarak in his speech on February 1st, 2011? I follow a text-analytic framework based on the socio-semantic theory of social actors and the pragmatic models of speech acts and face-threatening acts. The analysis reveals Mubarak’s attempt to save his positive political face as a legitimate President who regarded himself as the official ruler invested with absolute power over Egypt.
Keywords: political face, social actors, January 25 protests, Egypt, pragma-semantic analysis, Hosni Mubarak, performative power, speech acts, face-threatening acts
Published online: 5 May 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ps.5.1.06sal
References (24)
Abdul-Raof, Hussein. 2006. Arabic Rhetoric: A Pragmatic Analysis . New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Austin, John. 1962. How to Do Things with Words . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Basil. 1990. The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse . London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bloor, Meriel and Bloor, Thomas. 2007. The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis: An Introduction . London: Hodder Arnold.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope and Levinson, Stephen C. 1978. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Caffi, Claudia. 2007. Mitigation . Amsterdam & Oxford: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Corcoran, Paul E. 1979. Political Language and Rhetoric . St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press.Google Scholar
Edelman, Murray. 1977. Political Language: Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail . New York & London: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behavior . London: Cox & Wyman.Google Scholar
Laux, Lothar and Schütz, Astrid. 1996. ‘Wir, die wir gut sind’. Die Selbstdarstellung von Politikern zwischen Glorifizierung und Glaubwürdigkeit . Munich: dtv.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics . London: Longman.Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen. C. 1983. Pragmatics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pocock, J.[John] G. A. 1984. Verbalizing a political act: Toward a politics of speech. In: Language and Politics , M. James Shapiro (ed.), 25–43. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Schmitt, Carl. 1976. The Concept of the Political . (Trans. G. Schwab). New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Searle, John. 1976. The Classification of Illocutionary Acts. Language in Society , 51, 1–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 2002. Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics . Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Thomas, Jenny. 1995. Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics . London: Longman.Google Scholar
Thompson, Geoff and Hunston, Susan. 2000. Evaluation: An introduction. In: Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse , Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson (eds), 1–27. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. The representation of social actors. In: Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis , Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard (eds), 32–70. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis . New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009. Discourse as the recontexualization of social practice: A guide. In: Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (2nd ed.), Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer (eds), 144–161. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Wilson, John. 1990. Politically Speaking . Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. 2008. Introduction: Discourse Studies – Important Concepts and Terms. In: Qualitative Discourse Analysis in the Social Sciences ,Ruth Wodak and M. Krzyzanowski (eds), 1–29. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2009. The Discourse of Politics in Action: Politics as Usual . New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Alluhaidah, Monther
2023. A critical discourse analysis of Al Jazeera’s online coverage of the war in Yemen before and after the 5 June 2017 Gulf crisis. Discourse & Communication 17:5 ► pp. 553 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.