The ‘Jasmine Revolt’ has made the ‘Arab Spring’: A critical discourse analysis of the last three political speeches of the ousted president of Tunisia

Abstract

The current article addresses person deixis in the last three speeches of the ousted president of Tunisia (OPT) from the perspectives of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and cognitive-pragmatics. It takes deixis to be individuated in the ‘indexical field’ by the deictic center, who fills them from within the social field at his/her discretion with ‘social roles’. The way the filling takes place is a function of social proximity to or distance from the deictic center, which manipulates the constructed categories either closer to the CENTER or to the PERIPHERY of the image schema. In particular, it is argued that the OPT as a deictic center has constructed in the first two speeches two deictic categories, which would be called ‘wandering WE’ after and a peripheral THEY, through which he tried to maintain the political status quo and blame responsibility for the events on others. However, in the last speech, the OPT constructed two indexical dyads, namely I-YOU and WE-THEY. This shift is explained as an effort on the part of OPT to reproduce social power abuse, dominance, and inequality by way of making political concessions. Despite this, the shift is not felt to have created communality and closeness with the addressees since the policy of exclusion, authority, and domination precluded these concessions from being persuasive enough for the ‘Jasmine Revolt’ in Tunisia not to resist this power and go for regime change.