The Pragmatic Strategies of Concealment in Bush’s Speech of Announcing War Against Iraq in 2003

Concealment is the act of intentionally withholding information for some purposes. It is the mode of using language to hide information and intentions. The current study aims at finding out the pragmatic aspects of concealment. In accordance with the aim of the paper, it is hypothesized that the phenomena of concealment basically targets achieving persuasion and self- defense. The most important findings yielded by the analysis reveal that the main pragmatic aspects utilized in issuing concealment are breaching Grice's maxims, pragma-rhetorical devices, deictic expressions and positive politeness strategies.