Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Speeches Delivered during Presidential Elections in the USA

Abstract

The present thesis entitled Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Speeches Delivered during Presidential Elections in the USA was carried out to find out the discursive devices (micro level properties) prevalent in the speeches of the recent three American presidents linking them with macro level phenomena to reveal positive self-representation and negative other-representation in the speeches. To meet the objectives of the study both qualitative and quantitative designs were used. Nonrandom purposive sampling strategy was used to select only three speeches of recent

three election-winning American presidents. Obama's speech delivered on 10 th

February 2007 at Springfield, Illinois, Trump's speech delivered on 25 th June, 2016 and Biden's speech broadcasted through a video on 21 st August, 2020 were analyzed to show how they delivered speeches during their candidacy to win people‘s vote. The micro-level linguistic properties (discursive devices) were analyzed to show their techniques of positive-self representation and negative other representations using the socio-cognitive model of Van Dijk 2005. The major findings of the study were that all politicians used discursive devices to control the mind of voters by positive selfrepresentation and negative other-representation. Both techniques of positive-negative

representation were to capture the mind and votes of the audiences by showing

oneself better than others. They all wanted to represent themselves superior to their

opponents. All of them used US versus THEM to create poles between in groups and

out groups. They tried to create similarities with the audiences regarding their

ethnicity, society, and interest along with the national self-glorification. While

analyzing political speeches following Van Dijk's 25 discursive devices, discursive

devices like; burden, irony, disclaimer, implication, euphemism, and evidentially were

used less in number whereas actor description, counterfactuals, illustrations,

lexicalization, national self-glorification, number game, and norm expressions were

used high in number. The discursive devices to present self-positively and othersnegatively differed in number from each other. Obama and Trump used negative

other-representation in greater number but Biden used positive self-representation in

greater number. However, both techniques were used to capture the mind and votes of

the audiences by showing oneself better than others.

This thesis consists of five different chapters. The first chapter deals with the background of the study, statement of the problem, objectives of the study, research questions, significance of the study, delimitations of the study and operational definition of the key terms. The second chapter includes review of related theoretical literature, review of related empirical literature, implications of the review for the study and conceptual framework. The third chapter covers all the areas of methodology; design and methods of study, populations, sample and sampling strategy, source of data, data collection tools and techniques, and procedures. Similarly, the fourth chapter presents the results, findings and discussion. And the fifth chapter includes conclusion, and policy and practice related recommendations for further research.