A Semantico- Critical Discourse Analysis of Swaying Public Opinion in Selected Political Speeches

Abstract

The present study adopts Winifred Crombie’s (1985) framework of semantic relational structuring to examine how politicians try to sway public opinion by reversing moral roles—depicting the occupying power as a victim acting in self-defense and portraying the group defending its land as the occupier. For this purpose, the researcher purposively selects three political speeches by Rishi Sunak (the former prime minister of United Kingdom) concerning Israel’s conflict with Hamas and Iran, chosen from the years 2023–2025. The study aims to investigate how politicians use semantic structuring relations to promote particular political ideologies and attitudes in order to mislead the public. Crombie’s theoretical framework is applied primarily to identify the political ideologies operating within the selected speeches. These speeches are analyzed through the categories of Crombie’s SRS by examining sentence constructions that contain semantic structuring relationships, thereby demonstrating the speaker’s ability to construct and alter facts about Iran and Hamas. The study shows that the selected political speeches are filled with ideological allusions and clues intended by the speaker to sway the public opinion.