December 2009
Volume 4 Issue 2


| December 2009 home | PDF version |

Title
Jargonizing and Abstracting the “War on Terror”:
The “Self” and the “Other”  Representations 

Ahlam M. Al-Harbi 
Taif University, Saudi Arabia 

Biodata 
Ahlam Al-Harbi is a lecturer at the English Department in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Taif University, Saudi Arabia. Also, she is accredited by ATN-APTS as a freelance translator. Currently, she is a PhD student at Monash University, Australia. Her academic interests are sociolinguistics and discourse analysis: critical discourse analysis, political discourse, feminine studies, and forensic linguistics.  
 
Abstract:  
The study explores the use, the effect, and the role of jargon and abstraction as being types of the pragma-semantic X-phemism in English political discourses during the “War on Terror” to contribute to the field of Critical Discourse Analysis and show how such linguistic tools may embody and reveal the ideology and the attitude of the speaker. The proposed study examines the applicability of Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle and its maxims to explore jargonizing and abstracting strategies. Toward the ultimate objectives of the study, the analysis also investigates the salient implicatures, as well as the major presuppositions in the data, following Levinson (1983), besides the semantic aspects: connotation and denotation. This study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to determine the presence of the examined linguistic tools and the prevalence of one type over the other.  

Key Words: CDA, Jargon, Abstracting, Legitimizing, and Delegitimizing, and Emotive words: Sneer and Purr words