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“Speak that I May See You”: A linguistic Reading of Defining Moments of Egypt’s Military Council during the Revolution
Abstract
Jan. 25, 2012 in Egypt witnessed hot debates and unfortunate violent clashes over the idea of whether Egyptians should celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution or not. The Revolution started with the youth chanting “the people and the Army are united” and one year later, mostly the same groups are chanting “down with the military rule”. This paper tries to shed light on key scenes of the Egyptian Supreme Council of the Military Forces (SCAF) during that ‘transitional’ period and tries to analyze the discourse of these scenes in the light of the history of the military in Egypt after the 1952 Revolution to make sense of that shift. These scenes start with the Army’s dialogues with the youth groups directly after the Revolution and move through taking about 12 thousand civilians to military courts in one year. The analysis will depend on the SCAF’s official statements in preparation and in response to these scenes. It will highlight the functions of the distinctions made in language. This form-to-function analysis seeks to account for the strategic arrangement of the communicative intention of these statements or ‘discourse acts’. I propose that these discourse acts may themselves form part of a temporal sequence of larger moves. The formulation offered in this paper involves both the Interpersonal and the Representational levels of these discourse acts and the historical factors that might have led to the formulation of such acts since the 1952 Revolution in Egypt that created the military status we have today in Egypt. As Butler (2004) points out, the proper relation between functionalist theories and corpora is for the former to provide hypotheses which can be tested against data. This linguistic reading of those scenes that include the Special Forces’ armed intervention to end a sit-in in Tahrir Square, the so called ‘virginity tests’ and raiding NGO’s offices tries to provide a structure for the observation of linguistic phenomena and in this way is involved in the entire cycle of research from observation to prediction, to the testing of prediction through further observation of what will come next. What is offered here is an account of the inner structure of some key discourse acts that is sensitive to the impact of their use in discourse upon their form.
Discipline
Language
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Sub Area
Arabic