The Use of Women’s Language Features by Kamala Harris in the Vice-presidential Debate

Abstract

The number of women attaining leadership positions in governmental institutions is significantly increasing. The growth of recognizing women in the political sphere prompts the need for this paper to explore how women maintain power and authority on the 'floor' through their language choices. To that extent, this study aims to analyse Lakoff's women's language features used by Kamala Harris in the vice-presidential debate 2020 to reveal how she, as the first American woman-of-colour senator, maintains a powered speech through her linguistics choices. The qualitative research method is utilized, with the discourse analysis approach to explore how language use and its context construe meanings of social reality. Two primary sources are used in data gathering: vice-presidential debate transcription from rev.com and the vice-presidential debate video from NBCNews on YouTube. The result shows five out of ten women's language features used by Kamala Harris in the vice-presidential debates, consisting of 11 (16%) lexical hedges, 8 (11%) empathetic stress, 23 (33%) hypercorrect grammar, 1 (1%) super polite form, and 27 (39%) intensifier as the most dominant feature. However, there are no tag questions, rising intonation on declarative, empty adjectives, precise colour terms, and avoidance use of swear words.