A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF BIDEN’S SPEECH ON WAR IN UKRAINE AS A HERALD OF PENDING MAJOR GLOBAL GEOPOLITICAL SHIFTS

Abstract

This study applies Fairclough’s perspective on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a scientific tool to investigate how language is used to routinize ideology and power status both overtly and covertly. The research associates the dual scheme of the semantic and pragmatic potentials of language as displayed in President Joseph Biden’s speech on Ukraine’s invasion by Russia. It uses the linguistic and socially entwined feature of CDA for a quantitative and qualitative analysis that culminated in the pairing and comparing of what is discoursed with the state of affairs between Russia on the one hand and Ukraine, the United States of America, the European Union and the Partner countries on the other. The findings reveal through the layout of President Biden’s speech, the lexical occurrences and the discourse strategies that Russia represents a real concern and a threat for the United States of America and its allies and partners altogether within a geopolitical context of a weakening American deterrence capacity. The study concludes on the probability of a major global geopolitical shift in terms of technological, economic and military power ahead of the ongoing war.