ABSTRACT
This chapter explores possible links between the George W. Bush administration’s doctrine of unilateralism-one of the pillars of its foreign policyand the carefully studied discourse strategies that the rhetorical defence of such a position requires. In particular, the chapter focuses on features of the discourse of the White House press briefi ngs, which represent the main offi cial communication channel between the White House and the outside world. A corpus of all the briefi ngs and gaggles (informal meetings between podium and press) dating back to the fi rst term of the Bush administration (2001-2005), collected as an extension of the CorDis briefi ngs subcorpus, was investigated following the approach of corpus-assisted discourse analysis, and focusing in particular on one lexical item that at fi rst blush does not seem to carry any particular ideological weight-the noun message in its singular and plural form-in order to uncover non-obvious meanings of the word in the context of the briefi ngs, and highlight its prominent role in the Bush administration’s propaganda.
