الفهرس 
Remarkable Features of DebatesOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
. The Research Problem :
The aim of the present study is to conduct a critical discourse analysis of the World Economic Forum Debate that took place in Davos 2009. Political conferences and debates are occasions where contrasted ideologies and power relationships are revealed (Bhatia: 2006). Joint political conferences and debates, especially in the Middle East, are underrepresented in linguistic analysis. The analysis adopts an interdisciplinary approach comprising Transitivity Roles, Presuppositions and Allusions, and Cultural Lacunae.
The Arab-Israeli relations have been the cornerstone of the political conflict and peace process in the Middle East.
Research Goals and Questions:
The present thesis studies how a critical discourse analysis of joint Arab-Israeli political debates can reveal the political agendas of each. These agendas are generally obscured with friendly speeches and cliché phrases such as ‘The Road Map’, ‘Land for Peace‘ , ‘The Two-state Solution’, ‘The Final Settlement’, etc.
The present study attempts to answer the following questions:
1- How does the analysis of transitivity reveal attempts to establish positivity and assert mutual understanding, yet, simultaneously, reveal attempts on both sides to display power and influence? 2- What implicit messages are surreptitiously delivered by politicians to a variety of audience to assert certain ideological concepts or establish new ones? 3- How do cultural lacunae negatively or positively affect the politicians’ discursive performance and mutual understanding? 2. The Data : In order to answer the above questions a corpus of the political debate of the World Economic Forum in Davos 2009 has been assembled. 3. The Theoretical Framework : Within the interdisciplinary framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, the body of analysis consists of Transitivity Roles (Halliday1985, 1994, 2004); Presuppositions (S. Levinson, 1983; George Yule, 1996) and Allusions (Searl: 1976); and Cultural Lacunae (Sorkin and Markovina, 1993; Boykova, 2001; Ertelt-Vieth 2003 and Grodzki 2003). 4. Research Findings :
The Functional analysis of Transitivity roles proves that in Arab-Israeli joint conferences and debates certain noun phrases are fore-grounded as participants in different types of processes depend on the message to be delivered to the audience. On the one hand, the Israeli politicians deliberately foreground Israel as the Senser of Mental Processes, Actor of Material Processes and Carrier of Relational Processes where ‘peace’ functions as Phenomenon, Goal, or Identifier, respectively. Transitivity analysis also shows how Israelis justify their military actions against Palestinians. Whenever Israel is involved in aggressive actions, Mental Processes outnumber other processes to indicate that acts of aggression go through a long process of contemplation. The analysis demonstrates that Jerusalem occupies a central position in the Israeli thinking and this is revealed in the Israeli discourse. Jerusalem is foregrounded by repetition as a circumstantial element in all Israeli political discourse.
Furthermore, the Egyptian diplomat employs transitivity to assert the Egyptian and Turkish roles as mediators between the state of Israel and the Palestinian Authority.