Echoes of Violence: Speech Act Theory and the Pragmatics of (Im)politeness in Gaza Genocide Newspaper Coverage

Abstract

The Gaza-Israel conflict, a historical and persisting issue, has recently reignited with a humanitarian emergency in Gaza following Hamas' attack on Israel in October 2023. This study analyzes the representation of the conflict in global media, focusing on the strategies employed by newspapers to convey sensational news and the linguistic features used for politeness. The research poses three key questions: 1) How do different countries portray the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and is impoliteness present in these representations? 2) What strategies do media organizations employ to frame news about the Gaza conflict in either a polite or impolite manner? 3) What speech acts are prevalent in news articles covering the continuing violence in Gaza? Employing a qualitative approach, this research examines politeness strategies using Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson's "Politeness - Some universals in language usage" as a framework. Data was collected from major newspapers, and MAXQDA facilitated the qualitative analysis. The study focuses on the USA's New York Times, The Times (UK), The Japan Times, Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor (Switzerland), and Al-Jazeera (Qatar). The sample size includes five carefully selected articles from each newspaper, ensuring a comprehensive examination of speech acts and politeness strategies. The findings reveal distinct speech acts (Declaratives, Directives, and Commissives) and identify politeness strategies like "Bald on record Maximum urgency and desperation" as predominant in news articles, shedding light on the linguistic decisions employed by newspapers in framing the conflict.