"Politics is a matter of doing things with words" : investigating theme and cohesion in two political speeches

The thesis focuses on two political speeches (held by Bush and Blair respectively)evolving around the same topic: the justification for the military invasion in Afghanistan October 2001. The two main foci of the linguistic investigation are called "Theme" and "cohesion" which together constitute the textual metafunction in M.A.K.Halliday's system of Functional Grammar. The main framework used in this thesis is thus based on Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1994) and Halliday and Hasan's Cohesion in English (1976). Since Theme and cohesion are essential to the creation of texture, i.e. in determining what makes a text a text, I wanted to employ the two notions in order to find differences and similarities between the two texts, and to see whether the texts can be said to be "successful". A brief chapter presenting the principal features of political rhetoric is also included, linking up with the previous findings regarding Theme and cohesion