The Construction of the World Image in Al-Ebadi’s Selected Speeches on the Victory Over ISIS: A Critical Stylistic Approach

This work attempts to develop a transitivity model to be applicable to six televised Arabic speeches (5.113 words) delivered by the former Iraqi Premier after Iraqi victories over ISIS. We argue that clear-cut boundaries between distinct process types are sometimes fuzzy when dealing with data in Arabic. The use of transitivity choices constructs a text-world (Werth, 1999) with value judgements attached to it, namely that that the world is constructed on the binary opposition between the Iraqi actors are the (good) and the implicit patient (ISIS). Also, the Iraqis are given the heroic stance because they are ready to sacrifice for their country. We apply the framework of Critical Stylistics (Jeffries, 2010a) and build on one out of ten textual-conceptual functions of texts as proposed by Critical Stylistics, namely Representing Actions/Events/States, with the aim of deciphering ideological meanings in the speeches of the former Prime Minister.