View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by The University of Utah: J. Willard Marriott Digital Library DICTATORSHIP IS DEMOCRACY: THE PERSUASIVE POWER OF PERFORMANCE, REPETITION, AND SILENCE IN ARABIC POLITICAL SPEECHMAKING IN ASSAD’S SYRIA by Kellie Stirling A thesis submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Middle East Studies: Arabic and Linguistics College of Humanities The University of Utah December 2014 Copyright © Kellie Stirling 2014 All Rights Reserved The University of Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF THESIS APPROVAL The thesis of Kellie Stirling has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Thomas N. Huckin , Chair 08/22/2014 Date Approved Asaad Al-Saleh , Member 08/22/2014 Date Approved Peter von Sivers , Member 08/22/2014 Date Approved and by Johanna Watzinger-Tharp , Chair of the Department of Middle East Center and by David B. Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT This thesis is an analysis of performance, linguistic repetition, and silence in Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s March 30, 2011 speech to the People’s Assembly given 2 weeks after riots erupted in the Syrian province of Deraa on March 15, 2011. Various types of repetition including syntactic parallelism, word strings, lexical repetition, and phonological and morphological repetition particular to Arabic syntax and its root and pattern system of morphology are analyzed along with manipulative silence and performance aspects of the speech. This examination reveals that these features were employed intentionally in order to support political strategies and have a certain degree of persuasive or influential power over speech receivers. The analysis also exposes some of the possible practical and/or ideological considerations specific to the Arab or Syrian context which seem to be motivating either specific instances of repetition and/or the overarching political strategies supported by repetition structures, such as a perception of the U.S. and Israel as colonial or imperial oppressors, the increasing significance of words such as “revolution”, “people”, etc., in the Arab world, Syrian Ba’ath Party ideologies, Arab culture and the concepts of “honor” and “shame”, the preeminence of family in Arab culture, security concerns, Syria’s societal heterogeneity, tactics related to limiting communications, and Syrian national understanding of previous crises and regime critics. The study of emotive speech such as repetition is particularly relevant in the Syrian case where political ideology largely precludes the use of mixed Arabic and/or religious speech in political speech-making. This study facilitates further studies of repetition in speechmaking for Arab political leaders. Future studies will be enhanced if researchers are able to precisely measure reactions of speech consumers. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT……………………………………………………………………………...iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………..vii CHAPTERS 1: INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………...1 2: ARABIC POLITICAL SPEECH-MAKING…………………………………………...6 Language Variation……………………………………………………………….7 Variation and the Linguistic Market……………………………………………....9 When and When Not to Employ Colloquial Arabic in a Political Speech……………………………………………………………………12 Religion: Islam…………………………………………………………………...17 Emotive Speech………………………………………………………………….20 Repetition………………………………………………………………………...21 3: REPETITION IN ARABIC…………………………………………………………...26 Universality of Repetition………………………………………………………..27 Function of Arabic Repetition…………………………………………………...28 Crossover of Repetition………………………………………………………….30 4: POLITICAL CRISES IN SYRIA……………………………………………………..31 Arab Spring and the Syrian Uprising…………………………………………….34 5: ANALYSIS OF SPEECH PERFORMANCE………………………………………...38 The Speech……………………………………………………………………….38 Performing Democracy and Obedience………………………………………….39 6: STRUCTURES OF REPETITION……………………………………………………44 Lexical Couplets…………………………………………………………………44 Lexical Couplets and Semantic Groupings………………………………46 Lexical Couplets and Linguistic Levels………………………………….48 Phonological Level Repetition…………………………………………………...48 Morphological Level Repetition-Pattern………………………………………...55 Morphological Level Repetition-Root…………………………………………...57 Cognate Accusative……………………………………………………...60 Lexical Level Repetition…………………………………………………………63 Lexical Chains…………………………………………………………...63 Phrase and Discourse Level Repetition………………………………………….66 Parallelism………………………………………………………………..66 Paraphrase and Rhetorical Presentation………………………………….68 7: ANALYSIS OF REPETITION……………………………………………………….75 On Close Reading………………………………………………………………..75 Approach to Data Analysis………………………………………………………76 Strategy of Inspiring Fear………………………………………………………..77 Strategy of Inspiring Hope……………………………………………………….82 Strategy of Praising the People…………………………………………………..88 Strategy of Constructing Enemies that Shame and Oppress……………………..97 Strategy of Unification………………………………………………………….104 Analogy/Intertextuality…………………………………………………………111 8: ANALYSIS OF MANIPULATIVE SILENCE……………………………………...113 The Enemy……………………………………………………………………...114 Justice…………………………………………………………………………...117 Economic Policy………………………………………………………………..120 Democracy/Freedom Level……………………………………………………..121 9: CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………124 APPENDICES A: TRANSCRIPTION SYSTEM……………………………………………………....127 B: SUPPLEMENTAL SPEECH TRANSCRIPT………………………........................129 C: OFFICIAL SPEECH TRANSCRIPT……………………………………………….140 REFERENCES..………………………………………………………………………..154 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to all who supported me throughout the course of this project, including my knowledgeable and influential committee members, Dr. Thomas Huckin, Dr. Assad al-Saleh, and Dr. Peter Von Sivers, who at all times extended their time, energy, and patience; Arabic, Middle Eastern, and International Affairs professors, including but not limited to Dr. Mushira Eid, who were involved in shaping the way I think about pertinent issues; Manar al-Shataraat and Hossam Ahmed for their assistance in the transliteration and translation of Arabic texts; Middle Eastern studies colleagues for their illuminating observations and comments about language and politics in the Middle East; the staff at the Middle East Center, June Marvel, Kellie Parker Hubbard, and Johanna Watzinger-Tharp, who helped me naviga te administrative matters; my family, especially my parents, without whose support accomplishing this would not have been possible; Can Ozcan, whose awareness, insight, and esprit de corps made the most intense writing phases seem effortless; and, for the inspiration of the Syrian people, may God watch over them as they pass through this trial. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The analysis of political speech-making has been an important feature of modern studies in the field of political communication. Such analyses have been approached from a variety of disciplines. As the interdisciplinary field of political communication develops, studies of political speech-making have extended to include the study of political speech-making for various cultures, languages, and political systems. This includes the Arab World whose geopolitical significance has risen in recent decades due to a number of factors. Despite the increasing significance of the Arab World in international affairs, the number of studies which examine political communication remains lacking, and the number of studies which focus on political speech-making in the Arab World is even more infrequent. Linguistic studies of Arabic political speech-making have largely been dominated by sociolinguistic studies which have examined Arabic variation and/or language use through the lens of a linguistic marketplace. Other studies have examined the use of religious language in Arabic political speech-making. In Chapter 2, I demonstrate through other cases, most notably the Syrian case, how studying other aspects of language use in Arabic political speech-making might be beneficial in understanding the relationship between language use and political power in the Arab World. Emotive 2 speech (i.e. symbolic language, figures of speech such as metaphors or euphemisms, repetition, etc.) may present a useful approach with respect to the Syrian case. Repetition in Arabic political speech-making, specifically, represents an area of study which has yet to be fully explored. Most previous considerations of repetition in Arabic and repetition in Arabic political speech-making have been approached from a translational perspective focused on problems of translating repetition in Arabic to English where the same range of surface structures does not exist. These and other types of analyses of repetition in Arabic are informative for translators and language analysts as they specify the ways in which repetition in Arabic differs both structurally and functionally from repetition in English. In other words, they seek to shed light on those aspects of repetition use which may cause meaning to be “lost in translation” (or “lost in interpretation” for a language analyst). In Chapter 6, I discuss the principal features of Arabic repetition dealt with in the literature on repetition in Arabic and which were prevalent in the data for this study. These include parallel structures, word lists and word strings, lexical repetition, paraphrase/reverse paraphrase, and the cognate accusative structure, as well as phonological and morphological repetition particular to