Applying Van Dijk Model in Analyzing President Joe Biden’s speech on Russia’s Attack on Ukraine

Abstract

This article presents a critical discourse analysis of a speech which was delivered by The United States of America President Joe Biden on 24 Feb. 2022. Biden's speech was against President Putin and his country Russia because of the war in Ukraine. Such a speech against Russia will motivate many countries to be in alignment with Ukraine, supporting it. And these countries will join the war and start to support Ukraine till they defeat Russia. This study adopts Van Dijk's Model of discourse analysis. Hence, the study aims to show how Biden ideologically invested discursive strategies in the positive discourse of US (the USA, the Western countries and other allies). and the negative discourse of THEM (Putin, Russia, and their allies) Based on data analysis, the study found out that Biden ideologically invested the discourse strategies in almost all of his speech for political interests.

Van Dijk’s CDA was selected as a theoretical framework in this study as it draws knowledge from several fields, including sociology, psychology, politics and economics, which contribute to deepening the insights of this study.