Critical Discourse Analysis of Political Speeches Delivered during Presidential Elections in the USA
Date
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
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Department of English Education
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 peopleās 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.