A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF QUEEN ELIZABETH II SPEECH TO THE NATION ON CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC

Abstract

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) has been a crucial field in social sciences that aims to investigate the language structures in a social and cultural context. Furthermore, it scrutinizes the relationship between language, power, and ideology in political discourse as well as specific discourses such as media and literature. In other words, CDA is utilized to reveal the covert ideology in political speeches by focusing on language use. Various political speeches of significant politicians have been investigated by researchers so far. The common problem of different countries is coronavirus these days. Hence, the most popular speeches are generally about coronavirus. The purpose of this study is to investigate Queen Elizabeth II's speech to the nation on Coronavirus which is a call for unity. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar is used as a framework to analyze Queen’s speech and raise readers’ awareness in terms of comprehending the underlying messages in the speech based on three meta-functions: ideational function, interpersonal function, and textual function.