Critical Discourse Analysis of the Approval of Armenian Genocide by US Congress Panel in Four Languages

Abstract

News is perhaps the type of written discourse with which people are confronted most frequently. Hence, first and foremost, the importance attached to the news as written discourse is undeniable. On the other hand, Critical Discourse Analysis strives to take democratic and ethical approaches to deal with the social issues, new reports, as commonly used source of getting information. Therefore, news might be considered as one of the most appropriate materials to be focused upon in such analysis because CDA is a form of discourse analysis that takes a critical position towards how language is used and analyzes news and other discourse types in order to find out the ideology and values underlying them. In this study, an attempt was made to critically analyze a hotly debated piece of news on the approved Armenian genocide by US Congress panel in 2010. This news was critically analyzed in four languages including English, Turkish, Azerbaijani Turkish, and Persian. In so doing CDA, a model proposed by Huckin (1997) was applied. Hence, the general strategy involved moving from ‘text level’ to ‘word level’; at first, the news as a whole was taken into close account. Then, it was read sentence by sentence. Finally, words and phrases were in particular considered. Critically analyzing the news, some interesting similarities and differences among the four languages were found.

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis