Coronavirus Outbreak in Mexico: A Critical Discourse Analysis of AMLO’s Speech

Abstract

A recent pandemic called coronavirus (Covid-19) has been spreading rapidly around the world this year, 2020. While some countries have confirmed cases and deaths, others as Mexico start to see far approaches of what is likely to be a large coronavirus outbreak. A video posted in YouTube by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known by his nickname AMLO, portrayed his opinion regarding the coronavirus and the security measure. This paper, based on Critical Discourse Analysis theory and Systematic Functional Linguistics, explore AMLO’s speech by analyzing focused on transitivity and modality to discover what is behind the Mexican president’s speech and its social consequences. The findings suggest that AMLO’s speech has a different intention than convince the Mexican population that everything is fine.