Presupposition and Campaign Rhetoric, A Comparative Analysis of Trump and Hillary’s First Campaign Speech

Abstract

Considering the language phenomenon and its power in political discourse, this article sought to discover the use of presupposition triggers and its use to construct campaign rhetoric of the first campaign speech delivered by Trump and Hillary (2015) for the US presidential election 2016. Through descriptive qualitative, this study using theory of presupposition triggers proposed by Levinson (1983) and Yule (2010) discovered non-significant difference of frequency of presupposition use by Trump and Hillary; however, significant gap was found in several types of presupposition triggers (i.e. Factive, Pronoun, Temporal Clause, Comparison and Contrast, and Question). Moreover, Implicative and Non-factive were only found in Hillary’s speech, not in Trump’s speech. This study also employed Critical Discourse Analysis to discover the message of utterances containing presupposition triggers and categorized them based on the components of rhetoric campaign proposed by Medhrust (2005). This analysis found that both campaign speeches delivered by Trump and Hillary met all components (i.e. Agenda-setting, Framing, Character Construction, and Emotional Resonance) by the use of presupposition