Semantic Role Analysis of Provocative Political Discourse: A Case Study on Netanyahu’s UN Address on 22nd September 2023

This research uses semantic role analysis to analyze Netanyahu’s provocative political speech in the 78th session of the United Nations General Assembly, on 22nd September 2023. To achieve this aim, the semantic role analysis proposed by Jackson (2017) in Grammar and Meaning: A Semantic Approach to English Grammar is adopted to analyze the data under investigation. The qualitative method appears in the semantic role analysis, while the quantitative method appears in the analysis of numerical data. The data under investigation are extracts of Netanyahu’s UN address entitled ‘On the Cusp of Historic Saudi-Israel Peace’ on 22nd September 2023. The focus is on the excerpts where Netanyahu provokes the UN international community against Iran and Palestine States. The UAM Corpus Tool 3.3x 2007 developed by Mick O'Donnell and the Antconc Software 3.5.8 (2019) provided by Laurence Anthony are used in the quantitative analysis to present the types of semantic situations, semantic roles, and circumstances in numerical data. The results of the data analysis indicate that the provocative political discourse under investigation is characterized by the semantic situation of action as the most recurrent type, followed by the semantic situation of state. The semantic situation of the event is absent from the provocative political speech under investigation. The most recurrent participant roles are the affected, the agentive, the recipient, the attribute, and the resultant. Other participant roles detected in the data under investigation are the external causer, the locative participant, the instrument, the positioner, and the temporal participant.