| Description |
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. |
