Gender Differences in Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s Political Speech

Abstract

The objective of this study were to describe the ways of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton deliver speech in political field, to derive the characteristics of male and female’s poitical speech and to elaborate the reason of male and female politicians deliver their political speech. This researh conducted by applying descriptive qualitative research. The data of this study were 92 utterances of male politician and 51 utterances of female politician. Which were selected from male and female politicians’ presidential announcement speech in United States from year 2015. The findings showed that male and female politicians used both report and rapport talk in delivering their speech. Male mostly used report talk than rapport talk in show his self confidence and his status, and used rapport talk to gain relationship with other to gain support while female combine the both talk types in almost same amounts tend to imitate male speech behavior in order to defend her status and gain relationship with others. Male politician frequently show the characteristics of male communication, such as: status, independence, advice,information, and order in his way of delivering speech. While, female politician showed her support, intimacy, understanding, feeling, proposal in her speech. The reason why male politician used report talk whereas female politician used rapport talk is because male treats the language to give factual information, tease or thread other and show or keep his status and power, whereas female did it as a way to negotiate closeness and intimacy.