خلاصة:
This piece of work accounts for the process of legitimization which is considered to be pivotal in the use of discourse in society. It is an attempt to explain how language can be a medium of legitimation in society (Fairclough, 1989, 1995; Hodge and Kress, 1993). It highlights the various discursive strategies of legitimation that social actor could utilize to legitimize specific social practices. It shows how these strategies are employed by the American Presidents Obama and Trump in regard to the Syrian crisis and the character of the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. van Leeuwen’s (2007) four-strategy framework of legitimation has been advocated in this study to reveal how the two speakers manipulate the four strategies for legitimizing their social acts and delegitimizing the social acts of their adversary Bashar al-Assad. The study concludes that the four strategies are utilized by the two speakers to delegitimize the social act of using chemical weapons in Syria and to legitimize the launching of missile airstrikes against Syria. Among the four discursive strategies of legitimation (rationalization, moral evaluation, authorization, and mythopoesis), the discursive strategies of rationalization and mythopoesis appear to be the most productive in the discourse of the two speakers. The study also concludes that the discourse of the two Presidents shows intertexuality which echoes shared ideological implications.