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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 23:4 (2013) ► pp.633–659

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Framing and manipulation of person deixis in Hosni Mubarak’s last three speeches

A cognitive-pragmatic approach

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 December 2013
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.23.4.03maa
The “Arab Spring,” as the revolutions in some Arab countries were called by the international media, was triggered by the “Jasmine Revolt” in Tunisia, which provoked a domino effect to some Arab leaders, starting from Tunisia and spreading to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, etc. Using the insights of cognitive-pragmatics, the current article shows how the last three speeches of Husni Mubarak, the demised president of Egypt (DPE), framed the revolution in Egypt and filled person deixis. In particular, the article argues that, from the antepenultimate to the ultimate speech, the DPE, unlike his Tunisian counterpart, made little change to the initial framing of the revolution in Egypt as a strategy to maintain the sociopolitical situation as it was. As transpires from the lexical items environing person deixis, the DPE filled it with cognitive content which prevented him from coming any closer to a pragmatic rapprochement to the Egyptian people.
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