Abstract

Power and national identity play crucial roles in American diplomatic language and in shaping international communications. An investigation of the construction of American national identity and power is presented in this article via the examination of various linguistic strategies used in American diplomatic discourses in thirteen purposely selected speeches delivered by US ambassadors to Iraq since 2003. Van Dijk’s theory of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and Foucault’s theory about power, supported by Halliday’s functional linguistics, were used to investigate the construction of power and national identity via the examination of specific linguistic features. A mixed-methods approach was used in this study: The quantitative method entailed the application of a corpus tool to count the frequency of each linguistic feature using the Lancaster Corpus (LancsBox 6.0) program to highlight their significant distributions and variations in conveying power and identity. Conversely, the qualitative method was used to reveal the functional roles of these linguistic features in constructing power and identity in the ambassadors’ speeches. The findings showed that the strategic American diplomatic discourses concerning Iraqi issues were argumentative in nature, identified based on the use of numerous modal verbs and tenses, as US ambassadors influenced various areas of administrative life in Iraq since 2003. Furthermore, the extensive use of the first-person pronoun contributed to indicating clear, unilateral directions in the US diplomatic speeches addressed to Iraqi leaders. Therefore, personal pronouns, repetition, and the active voice were applied ideologically to construct national identity and power in American diplomatic discourses.