Self-Image Projection in Mohammed Bin Salman's Political Interviews: A Pragma-Semantic Approach to Political Discourse Analysis

—This paper presents a political discourse analysis (PDA) of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s (MBS) interviews. The main purpose of the paper is to show how the image of a competent political leader is linguistically rendered by various linguistic practices in the selected interviews. The paper draws on political discourse analysis as discussed by Chilton (2004) and Chilton and Schaffner (2002). The analytical focus is on demonstrating how a positive self-image is communicated linguistically and deciphering the socio-political meanings encoded in the selected interviews at the pragmatic and semantic levels of analysis. The corpus of this study constitutes four interviews conducted with MBS: his interview with CBS TV in 2019, his interview on Vision 2030 broadcast on Saudi national TV in 2021, his interview with The Atlantic in 2022, and his interview with FOX News in 2023. The study depends on a mixed-method approach manifested in the employment of both quantitative and qualitative analyses. There are three main findings in this paper: First, in the selected interviews, MBS not only does politics but also projects a positive self-image by presenting himself as a solidary and collective, decisive, diplomatic, human-rights observer, and broader-goals-seeking leader. Second, these positive characteristics of a competent leader have been linguistically manifested at the pragmatic and semantic levels of analysis. Third, political interviewing is a form of mediatized political discourse that communicates a specific ideology-laden message of politicians.