A Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump’s Language Use in US Presidential Campaign, 2016

Abstract

The present study reports on the latest and newest hot topic in the world, the United States Presidential Election. So, this is the newest attempt to explore and discover interrelation of discourse structures and ideological structures of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech in the United States Presidential Election, 2016 as a good sample of his language use in presidential campaign. In so doing, the current study utilizes Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) model to unmask the use of power and hidden strategies through language use. Also we analyze and uncover the experiential, relational and expressive values of the wordings, metaphors and grammatical structures of Trump’s language use.  Furthermore, this study tries to show that there are linguistic traces that depict the strategy and ideology in the text as well. The findings of the present study can be provocative for English foreign language learners to promote their analytical skills. Therefore, findings of the present article can be applied to English Reading Comprehension and Reading Journalistic Texts classes.