‘BENEFICIARY’ AS A MEANS FOR A DICHOTOMOUS REPRESENTATION IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

This paper focuses on the employment of the participant role ‘Beneficiary: Recipient’ inthe discourse of U.S. President George W. Bush in the period from September 11, 2001to May 1, 2003. The analysis presented in the paper has been conducted on the corpus of92 speeches delivered by the speaker. The aim of the paper is to observe the formation ofthe ‘Us’ and ‘Them’groups on the basis of the involvement of the participant ‘Beneficiary:Recipient’. The theoretical framework for the analysis is grounded in the system oftransitivity developed by M. A. K. Halliday. In the analytical part, the focus will be placedon the analysis of the participant ‘Beneficiary: Recipient’ that is involved in Materialprocesses in George W. Bush’s discourse. It will be argued that the employment of thisparticipant also contributed to positive presentation of ‘Us’ and to negative presentationof ‘Them’