Challenging Dictatorship through Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Charlie Chaplin’s Speech in The Great Dictator

Abstract

ABSTRACT

The present study deals a Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) analysis of Charlie Chaplin’s climactic address in the Great Dictator (1940) to examine how the speech challenges dictatorship and war, constructs a discourse of peace and humanity, and reflects its WWII context. We transcribe the speech and code clause-by-clause for DHA strategies—nomination/predication of social actors, argumentation via topoi (danger, responsibility, usefulness, justice, history), perspectivization (deixis/footing), and intensification/mitigation—integrated with Systemic Functional Linguistics for transitivity and modality, and with metaphor/framing diagnostics. Findings show systematic delegitimation of authoritarian power: rulers are de-charismatized (“machine men”) while “you, the people” are re-authorized as ethical agents through transitivity choices that cast citizens—not leaders—as Actors in material processes. The speech repurposes conventional wartime warrants (danger, duty) so that must encode moral obligation to protect the vulnerable, and resemanticizes mobilization (fight) as civic, nonviolent action. Inclusive you dixies, anaphora and antithesis, and master metaphors (machine vs. human; light vs. darkness) organize a persuasive moral grammar that privileges dignity over domination. Historically, references to radio and aeroplanes reframe modern technology as solidarity-enabling, while a hopeful now/soon/tomorrow temporality resists fatalism. Conceptually, the study specifies how a humanist counter-discourse can be operationalized in language; methodologically, it demonstrates the payoffs of DHA triangulation on a canonical cultural text.

Keywords: Discourse-Historical Approach, critical discourse analysis, Chaplin, the Great Dictator, authoritarianism, framing, metaphor, transitivity, modality, WWII rhetoric.