독재자와 언어 - 재스민 혁명과정에서의 벤 알리 튀니지 대통령 연설을 중심으로-

Abstract

In this paper, I have tried to analyze the three speeches delivered by Tunisian President Ben Ali during the Tunisian Jasmine Revolution before he was forced to leave his country. For the sake of seeing if there is any shift among these speeches from the linguistic and rhetorical aspects I have examined the themes and structures of the speeches, concentrating on the linguistic tools and rhetorical strategies employed by him to face the protests by Tunisian people. The paper concludes that as the protest and the social unrest became worse, Ben Ali used different linguistic devices such as a code-switching, self-referencing and repetition in addition to the various rhetorical strategies in dealing with the protest in context with the social situation. As he spoke for the first time in Tunisian dialect in his last speech, it meant he intended to shorten the psychological and emotional gap between him and the people. Ben Ali used the traditional tactics of ascribing the demonstration to the terrorists and the criminals, employing the tactics of cane and carrots. Ben Ali’s last speech showed the mood of begging,a different change from the previous speeches. Also the frequent use of the first-person pronoun in the last speech in comparison with the previous two speeches showed the seemingly shift of the public identity of Ben Ali linguistically and psychologically from the dictatorial president to the ordinary people. Lastly,the use of the term Sha’b in the last speech can be interpreted as the sign of recognizing the sovereignty of the people after long years of dictatorship. It is expected that this study can be used as the foundation for determining the Arab dictators’ pattern of discourse such as former Egyptian president Mubarak,Syrian president Bashshar and Qadhafi of Libya in future relevant researches.