A Critical Study of National Solidarity, Patriotism and Corruption in Imran Khan's Address to the Nation

Abstract

Based on the tradition of critical discourse analysis, the purpose of this study is to explore how a political leader can promote his or her ideology through the skilful use of language.  This article critically analysed Prime Minister Imran Khan's address to the nation after the new Prime Minister was elected.  It was transmitted by Pakistan Television on August 19, 2018 at 9.30 PM.  The purpose of the present study is to highlight patriotism, national solidarity and corruption that Imran Khan has worked on since the first address given as the Prime Minister, and reviewed his political maturity.  Researchers have tried to uncover the ideas that work behind a given speech and investigated that how dissimilar linguistic tools have been used to project or achieve political power/ objectives.  Selected speech has been consistently analysed using Fairclough's analytical framework, which he proposed in 1995 and with the help of other tools, such as contextual strategies, repetition, word choice, positive self-representation and negative second representation. It studied that how specific words and phrases have the power to change people's perceptions and political views.  General Chat Lounge it was found that political discourse is often purposely crafted to present specific ideas, which are always present in the dialogue.  Moreover, politicians used some linguistic tactics to convince people to stick to their hidden agenda.  It may be suggested that the rules and symbols of political discourse should be explored so that the general public can easily find them.  The present study explores that how it sets different stages in controlling people's minds because language is the primary means of building individual and group relationships and analysing discourse to expand that relationship.