A Pragmatic Study of Concealment in Tony Blair’s Speeches on Iraq War

Abstract

Concealment, among other crucial notions appeared during the process of political discourse analysis, means hiding the truth by one of the parties participating in the communication event who intends to deceive the other party. It is either the manipulation of information or changing the truth whether intentionally or unintentionally or a deceptive strategy. It is considered as one of the means used by politicians to achieve certain goals and aims, of them is influencing the behaviors, desires, beliefs and emotions of their audience to their self-interests.The main concern of the current study is to discuss the concept of concealment in Tony Blair’s speeches on Iraq during the time of UN sanctions on Iraq and during the time of the preparation for the war on Iraq.The study is carried out with the aim of specifying the concealment criteria, pinpointing the strategies of concealment used to fulfill each stage of concealment, and finally highlighting the pragmatic strategies of concealment resorted to by Blair in his speeches and finding out which pragmatic strategies score higher frequency in these speeches.The findings show that the main aim of Blair in concealing facts in his speeches is to achieve persuasion. To achieve this aim, pragma-rhetoric devices, as a pragmatic strategy, are highly used and they score the highest frequency.