Critical Discourse Analysis of empowerment in “Amid the Rubble of Mosul, Francis Offers a Salve for Iraq’s Wounds”

Positive Discourse Analysis is a complementary approach for Critical discourse analysis, yet the former intends to have a positive orientation to make the world a better place to live in. The present study attempts to find out one of the syntactic strategies positively used by The New York Times in a report entitled “Amid the Rubble of Mosul, Francis Offers a Salve for Iraq’s Wounds” through which the ideology of empowerment is used to encourage individuals and enhance confidence in their active participation in social, economic, and political processes. To accomplish the analysis of one of the syntactic strategies of the selected report, the present study intends to analyze a report on the first-ever papal visit to Iraq by Pope Francis through the lens of transitivity to examine how the media report from the New York Times utilizes this strategy to focus on the positive effect of the visit. The present study aims at finding (1)the types of empowerment and (2) investigating the most frequently used process in transitivity to reflect empowerment. It is hypothesized that empowerment has six types and (2) there are six processes of transitivity, with material process being the most widely used in the chosen report. The methodology of the present study includes (1) a theoretical survey of CDA and PDA, and (2) analyzing the chosen data qualitatively and quantitatively. An eclectic model is used based on Fairclough model of CDA (1989) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2014) for transitivity. The findings show how the selected tool ,especially the material process, is functionalized to express empowerment in Media to affect the life of the ordinary people.