ABSTRACT
A speech given by an orator contains certain ideas that need to be conveyed. These ideas also include power relations. This study aims to reveal the main ideas of Muhammad Mursi’s speech at the 67th United Nations General Assembly and to explain the language strategies used to establish the power relations between him and his audience. The speech was delivered in Modern Standard Arabic. The method used in this research is a qualitative one. This study employs Fairclough’s (2010) critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the core theory. As the core theory, it also encompasses other theories, such as van Dijk’s macro rules (1980), Halliday’s functional grammar (2014), Nida’s components of meaning (1979), Yule’s presupposition (2010), and the theory of power relations by Foucault (2008) and Fairclough (2015). The result shows that there are two main ideas behind the speech, namely Muhammad Mursi’s identity as the President of Egypt after the revolution, and Egypt’s new visions of itself and the world. Furthermore, the language strategies used to build the power relations were applied through the use of powerful dictions, epistemic modalities and interjectional particles, functional imperatives, emphatic particles and nouns, statement on the identity of the orator, knowledge, and deletion of several participants.
