MACRO AND MICRO-STRUCTURAL ANALYSES OF PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP’S VICTORY SPEECH: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS APPROACH

Abstract

Language is a powerful instrument of persuasion, a tool for gaining and controlling power. Its importance is noticeable during presidential elections in democratic countries where aspirants ought to convince their audience to get their vote. It is ideological as it deals with careful selections of linguistic elements that convey the user’s ideology and intended message. This paper investigates some aspects of Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump’s victory speech in the 2019 presidential election. It aims to explore how the speaker has managed to convey his messages and beliefs through the use of speech acts and deictic elements. A mixed-method approach has been used in this study. The results show, first, that the macrostructural analysis has displayed the global organization of this victory speech. Second, the micro-structural analysis indicate that person deixes and representative speech acts are the most dominant linguistic features identified in Donald Trump’s speech. They prove to be the strategies used to express political messages and make maximum impact on the audience.