Circumlocution in King Abdullah II’s Discussion Papers

Abstract

This article studies circumlocution in King Abdullah II's Discussion Papers in light of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus-based analysis. The analysis aims to investigate the role of using this strategy in identifying the ideologies embedded in the discourse of democracy and reform adopted by the Jordanian Monarch. The study relied on a small corpus of the seven Royal Discussion Papers published between December 2012 and April 2017. The study demonstrated that King Abdullah II considerably employs circumlocution in his Discussion Papers to convey his vision, ideas, and ideologies about democracy and reform in Jordan by repeating a set of keywords to accentuate his vision of the enactment of reform and democracy in Jordan. These keywords are found to reflect the King’s ideologies on the basis of four key assumptions: the Partakers, Reform, My Nation, and Optimism and Sanguinity.