What Lies Underneath a Political Speech?: Critical Discourse Analysis of Thai PM’s Political Speeches Aired on the TV Programme Returning Happiness to the People

Abstract

Abstract:The main goal of the study is to critically investigate the major elements of the political speeches of the Thai Prime Minister, Gen Prayuth Chan-ocha. Informed by van Dijk's (1997) concept of Political Discourse Analysis, a corpus, composed of 10,672 word types and 325,398 word tokens, was examined for keywords related to the addressor, the addressee, and the political speech itself. The words with the highest relative frequencies were iteratively categorised into themes and a dialogic investigation was conducted on a portion of the original Thai version. The findings reveal that keywords relating to information conveyed by the addressor accounted for 62.86% (N=154) followed by keywords relating to functions of language at 22.04% (N=54). The high frequencies of these words shed light on the justification of the political, economic and social agenda, which were conveyed by the junta government using deontically modalised language. The quantitative and qualitative data analysis also indicate that the English and Thai speeches target different audiences. This discrepancy implicitly reflects an awkward situation where the military government attempts to present a good image to the international community while imposing actual military governance in the country.

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“…Numerous studies have concentrated on the analysis of political discourse such as political speeches and political debates. In terms of research subjects, many researchers laid emphasis on the speeches of political leaders (Sharififar & Rahimi, 2015;Borriello, 2017;Carreon & Svetanant, 2017;Alemi, Latifi, & Nematzadeh, 2018). As for research content, gender issues in political settings (Vasvári, 2013;Dicu, 2018;Petlyuchenko & Charnyakova, 2019), strategies and tactics such as silence to realize political goals (Alagözlü & Sahin, 2011;Ponomarenko, Vasilkova, Volskaya, Kasperova, & Nikolaeva, 2018;Alemi, Latifi, & Nematzadeh, 2018), and techniques like irony, metaphors, and the use of hyperboles, acclaims, attacks and defenses in political speeches and debates (Benoit & Sheafer, 2006;Nuolijärvi & Tiittula, 2011;Linkeviciute, 2019;Abbas, 2019) are among the themes of interest for many scholars.…”

“…Additionally, among the above studies, many of them utilize linguistic theories and measures as their main research method, of which CDA is a frequently used one (e.g., Sharififar & Rahimi, 2015;Carreon & Svetanant, 2017;Wang & Liu, 2018). CDA entails applying "discourse analytic techniques" "to interrogate social phenomena" with the combination of "a critical perspective" (Ainsworth & Hardy, 2004, p. 236).…”

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“…In surveying the recent annals of literature, some other considerable studies have also inspected various political, advertisement etc. discourses in light of CDA to discern multiple strategies exploited by orators and political pundits and to show how politicians make the text/talk persuasive, significant, appealing and obscure, as well as how they convey their intended objectives to the audience (Zhou & Kazemian, 2015;Hussein, 2016;Amoli, 2016;Skarp, 2016;Carreon, & Svetanant, 2017;Gill & Kausar, 2017;Albtoush & Sahuri, 2017, etc. ).…”