Topic 8 - Discourse structure and point of view > Ideological viewpoint > Task B > Our answer

Ideological viewpoint

Our answer for task B

We now move from what each country has to the activities of the combatants (though note the metonymic use of the pronoun 'we'. It is not us the nation or us the readers of the newspapers, who perform the various activities, but the individual combatants, who 'represent' us in the war.

In this pair of lists the more 'normal' terms appear to be in the Iraqi list. For example, although 'kill' is not pleasant, it is what we expect soldiers to do, and so 'suppress', 'eliminate', 'neutralise' and 'decapitate' seem strangely euphemistic by comparison, and suggest that the lexical selection here is 'spinning' the activities of the British combatants in an over-positive light. The same point can be made about 'destroy' and its two opposing terms.

There are also some features in this section which suggest that, although the journalists being criticised were clearly unreasonable in their journalistic behaviour, the Guardian journalist is not being entirely reasonable either. Firstly, in spite of the pattern which suggests that equivalent items in the two columns are alternative expressions for the same thing, 'dig in' and 'cower in their foxholes' are not alternative terms for the same activity. The Iraqis presumably had to dig their foxholes too, before they could 'cower' in them, and this illicit use of the oppositional structure casts doubt on the objectivity of the Guardian journalist too. Similarly, the repetition of the words 'destroy' and 'kill' in the second columns has obvious rhetorical effects. The same opposition could have been achieved by having three 'English' alternatives to one instance of 'kill', thus avoiding the effect of the repetition, and so it could be argued that the person producing the columns is 'protesting a bit too much'.

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