A Critical Discourse Analysis of Language Variation According to Gender in Selected Public Political Speeches: A corpus-based Study

Abstract

This study is a corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of selected public political speeches. The analysis is based on Halliday’s systemic functional grammar and the componential analysis semantic approach. It tries to prove that gender is a factor that affects the speakers’ linguistic choices in public political speeches. In an attempt to identify the grammatical and lexical differences and similarities between different gendered speakers, Sketch Engine online tool is used for obtaining statistical results. Moreover, the study investigates the ideological background of the speakers. The findings of the analysis showed that gender affects the linguistic choices of male and female politicians. The speeches under analysis showed also that each gender has its own grammatical and semantic choices. Finally, it concluded that the topic of speaking governs the linguistic choices of each gender. Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, Language Variation, Semantic analysis, Political speeches, Corpus-based analysis