This research was conducted to analyse the power struggle of Tories or
members of the Conservative Party in the UK parliamentary debate on 2 December
2015. The objectives of this research were to find the Tories’ power-struggle indicators;
to linguistically examine the power relationship built in the debate interaction, and to
reveal the convention of the struggling.
This research is descriptive qualitative and thus, the data were collected
through non-probability sampling in which purposive and criterion-based sampling
determine the three analysed debate texts from the Tories’ debate speeches as the
source of data. In collecting the data, it uses snowball sampling and content analysis
technique by writing the transcript and examining the content of the data by degree.
The results of data analysis found in this research were divided into three: (1)
To be influential, the Tories used negative labelling to ISIL and high use of medium-high
modalities; (2) Regarding the debate winning, the Tories assured others through
argumentative-declarative modes, maintained relationships through formality and
euphemism, and implied solidarity through the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ to gain public
sympathy; (3) To dominate the debate, some intertextual devices such as assertions,
rhetorical questions, controlling topic, etc were employed by the Tories to control the
contribution of the less powerful participants in the debate.
This research hopefully gives benefits to further researchers focusing on a
spoken discourse by using Critical Discourse Analysis as the approach. Besides, this
research is expected to give a broad picture of the Tories’ struggling in a debate.
Keywords: Power Struggle, Critical Discourse Analysis, the United Kingdom,
Parliamentary Debate, Argumentative Discourse