A Contrastive Critical Discourse Analysis of Pseudo-Ignorance in two English and Arabic Politicians' Speeches

Abstract

The justification for ambiguity and hedging is known as pseudo-ignorance strategy; speakers may pretend not to know something, but they may subtly imply that they do, making assertions that do not require supporting evidence. These kinds of seeming knowledge are usually seen in disclaimers, like “I don't know, but...” which, in spite of the ignorance claimed, affirms the truth of the but-clause, which is also a tactic used in impression management. This study tries to be an attempt to contrast the political employment of the strategy pseudo-ignorance between two English and Arabic political speeches, drawing on investigating the four syntactic, semantic, lexical, and pragmatic levels of Van Dijk (1995) and James (1980) for analyzing the data contrastively. The study opines to choose speeches of two American and Iraqi politicians, Donald Trump and Ayad Allawi to be investigated and contrasted. The study concludes that pseudo-ignorance is the political strategy that is used by both politicians Trump and Ayad Allawi in order to achieve their personal and political purposes.