scholarly journals A pragmatic study of speech as an instrument of power: Analysis of the 2016 USA presidential debate

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-113
Author(s):  
Misyi Gusthini ◽  
Cece Sobarna ◽  
Rosaria Mita Amalia

This research was aimed at analyzing the speeches of Donald Trump and of Hillary Clinton in the USA Presidential candidates’ debates as instruments of power. The data is a presidential final debate video of Trump and Clinton made in September 2016 which has been converted into a transcript. The data analyzing technique is divided into three steps: 1) describing the context, 2) analyzing the illocutionary acts, and 3) analyzing the power dimensions. The results of this research show that the speakers use the speech act as an instrument of power with classifications of representative, commissive and expressive. In this regard, the researchers found that the speakers demonstrated their power to try to convince the voters in their society to trust them to be the president. The research results also showed that the usage of speech in debate as an instrument of power can influence the voters especially on Election Day.

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 125
Author(s):  
Nura Siti Mufiah ◽  
Muhammad Yazid Nur Rahman

This research deals with the types of illocutionary acts in Donald Trump’s Inaugural Speech. The research concerns with illocutionary act produced by Donald Trumps as a President of American. The aim of this research was to analyze the types of illocutionary speech act which was dominantly used in that speech. This research applied descriptive qualitative method and speech act theory by Yule. There were 63 utterances and the percentage of utterances were Representative 46%, Expressive 11%, Directive 16%, Commissive 12,7%, and Declarative 14,3%. The result showed that Donald Trump assert to the audience about the nation will be.It is found that Trump’s speech acts in his speech are intended as statement of fact and assertion. Disscussion of hopes implied in Trump’s speech acts. As seen on the table above, it can be seen that Trump hoped that his audiences would be persuaded to act 


2019 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-160
Author(s):  
Jan Zilinsky ◽  
Cristian Vaccari ◽  
Jonathan Nagler ◽  
Joshua A. Tucker

Michael Jordan supposedly justified his decision to stay out of politics by noting that Republicans buy sneakers too. In the social media era, the name of the game for celebrities is engagement with fans. So why then do celebrities risk talking about politics on social media, which is likely to antagonize a portion of their fan base? With this question in mind, we analyze approximately 220,000 tweets from 83 celebrities who chose to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2016 U.S. presidential election campaign to assess whether there is a cost—defined in terms of engagement on Twitter—for celebrities who discuss presidential candidates. We also examine whether celebrities behave similarly to other campaign surrogates in being more likely to take on the “attack dog” role by going negative more often than going positive. More specifically, we document how often celebrities of distinct political preferences tweet about Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton, and we show that followers of opinionated celebrities do not withhold engagement when entertainers become politically mobilized and do indeed often go negative. Interestingly, in some cases political content from celebrities actually turns out to be more popular than typical lifestyle tweets.


2017 ◽  
Vol 63 (7) ◽  
pp. 856-887 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela S. Shockley-Zalabak ◽  
Sherwyn P. Morreale ◽  
Carmen Stavrositu

This study explored voters’ perceptions of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump regarding their general trust in the two 2016 presidential candidates, voters’ demographics, five underlying drivers of trust, and important campaign issues. The study also examined how perceptions of trust on issues were evidenced in the popular vote and in key swing states and the Electoral College. The study used two online census-representative surveys to examine registered voters’ perceptions: one survey of 1,500 respondents conducted immediately before the first presidential debate (September 7-15, 2016) and a second survey of a different sample of 1,500 immediately after the third debate (October 20-31), 2016. Analysis of the results confirmed relatively low-trust levels for both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and an electorate divided demographically about their trust in the two candidates. The five trust drivers yielded statistically significant differences between the candidates. Clinton was evaluated as more competent, concerned, and reliable, and a person with whom participants identified. With the second survey, Trump statistically surpassed Clinton for openness and honesty. Regarding the three issues of most importance in the campaign, Clinton and Trump had equivalent trust evaluations for dealing with the U.S. economy/jobs, but Trump was more trusted regarding terrorism/national security and Clinton was more trusted regarding health care. The overall trust evaluations for Clinton, coupled with intentions to vote, contribute to understanding Clinton’s popular vote victory. However, the importance of terrorism/national security in swing states and Trump’s trust advantage on that issue contributes to understanding the Electoral College vote by comparison with the popular vote.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 215-235
Author(s):  
Thouraya Zheni

Language users may use the standardized forms of speech acts as a strategy to achieve their own purposes, like political agendas. This is the objective of the present study, which focuses on the manipulation of speech acts in Donald Trump’s tweets on the US-Iranian crisis. More specifically, the current research paper sheds light on hegemony in political discourse and how it is embedded in assertive, commissive, directive, declarative and expressive speech acts. The tweets of Donald Trump, delivered between January 2017 and December 2019 and related to the US-Iranian crisis, will be analyzed within the framework of Speech Act Theory. The results of the current research show that Trump’s use of speech acts demystifies his hegemonic tone towards Iranian leaders. His power is mediated explicitly via directives and commissives, while it is exerted implicitly via expressives and assertives. His use of direct and indirect speech acts reveals Trump’s ambivalence and willingness to solve the US-Iranian nuclear crisis via both hegemony and diplomacy.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-118
Author(s):  
Zuliati Rohmah ◽  
Alda Fitriani Suwandi

The current study explores types and functions of interruptions of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the US presidential debates in 2016. Data collected from Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s speech in the debates were transcribed and analyzed to find types and functions of interruptions by both of the candidates. The results of the conversational analysis display that Donald Trump dominates the interruptions by applying a substantially greater number of interruptions consisting of three different types of interruptions. Butting-in Interruptions were applied by both as the biggest number of interruptions. Data analysis also demonstrates that intrusive functions appear much more frequently compared to the collaborative functions of interruptions applied by the male and female presidential candidates. Discussion as to why such phenomena are noticeable in the data concludes the paper. 


Author(s):  
Desinta Larasati ◽  
Arjulayana - Arjulayana ◽  
Cut Novita Srikandi

ABSTRACTLearning language will also relate to speech act. When a speaker produce an utterance as well as utilize it to perform an action, it means that the speaker practices speech acts. In another hand, speech acts can be defined as an utterance used by speaker to perform an action. Speech acts are divided into three such as locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. One of them is illocutionary act. The illocutionary act refers to what someone does in saying something. In this act, illocutionary force is the speaker’s intent addressed to hearer. This research is aimed to find the types of illocutionary acts and identifying about how utterances in the Donald Trump’s speeches are able to be included into certain type of illocutionary acts be based on Searle’s theory. This research is designed in descriptive qualitative. The data is collected by documentation. The primary data are taken from two transcripts of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy speeches. While the secondary data are related theories obtained from literary books and journals. The procedure of analyzing the data starts by finding out the types of illocutionary acts in the Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy speeches by using the illocutionary acts’ classifications proposed by Searle (1969). After that, the researcher also identifies about the different frequency of illocutionary acts appearances and the dominant illoctionary acts appeared in the Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy speeches. The finding shows that the type of illocutionary acts found in the Donald Trump’s speeches were assertive, commissive, expressive, and directive. Eventhough the types of illocutionary acts found in Donald Trump’s speeches were exactly the same, but they were different in the frequency of appearance. Donald Trump produced mostly assertive type of illocutionary acts and also asserting category of illocutionary type in both of the speeches. Moreover, some utterances are included into assertive type of illocutionary acts due to the fact that they have a suitability with the explanation of assertive type of illocutionary acts proposed by Searle.Keywords: Illocutionary Acts, Speech Acts, Presidential Candidacy Speeches.


2019 ◽  
Vol 35 (40) ◽  
pp. 11-29
Author(s):  
Zorica Trajkova ◽  
Silvana Neshkovska

[full article and abstract in English] Politicians invest a lot of time and effort to win elections and present themselves in the best possible manner. They use language strategies to present and legitimise themselves as the right choice. And if they are the right choice, then their opponent is obviously not, so while they are trying to acclaim themselves and their political party, they use strategies to delegitimise and attack their opponents and the policy they represent. This paper aims to conduct a critical discourse analysis of the speeches of the two main political opponents in the last elections in the USA, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The research gives an insight into the manipulative function of language and covers two aspects: the lexical-semantic and pragmatic aspect and is based on the supposition that the strategies politicians use while talking about themselves and describing their opponents differ. As expected, they use more positive terminology to talk about themselves and their policies, and negative terminology to criticise the opponent’s policy. They also employ different pragmatic strategies, such as intensifiers and inclusive pronouns, to involve the audience into the discourse and convince them in their arguments. Finally, although carried out on a relatively small corpus, the analysis gives an insight into the language techniques employed by politicians to legitimise themselves and delegitimise their opponent and thus win the elections.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1532673X2110415
Author(s):  
Boris Heersink ◽  
Nicholas G. Napolio ◽  
Jordan Carr Peterson

Recent scholarship on the effect of candidate visits in presidential elections has found that appearances by candidates appear to mobilize both supporters and opponents. Specifically, in the 2016 presidential election, donations to campaigns of the visiting presidential candidates increased, but—in the case of Republican nominee Donald Trump—so did donations to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. In this paper, we extend this research by assessing the effect of visits on campaign donations by presidential and vice presidential candidates in the 2020 election. We find evidence that visits by Donald Trump and Kamala Harris had strong mobilizing and counter-mobilizing effects, increasing donations to both campaigns. We find weak evidence that visits by Joe Biden increased contributions to his campaign, but we do not find evidence that his visits had a counter-mobilizing effect, and we find no evidence that visits by Mike Pence affected donations in either direction.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Kramsch

Abstract Pragmatics has focused predominantly on the locutionary form and illocutionary force of utterances but largely ignored their perlocutionary effects. A shift toward the perlocutionary would require much greater attention being given to the historical and political context in the production and reception of utterances, as well as to interpretation as a performative process. This paper takes as empirical data a press report on the performance of a particular speech act by Donald Trump and its perlocutionary effect both on his addressee and on the readers of the incident as reported in the online versions of the New York Times and Die Zeit. It shows the value of focusing on perlocution for the study of political discourse in these global times. It also shows what pedagogical purchase can be gained by discussing perlocutionary acts and effects in communicative language teaching, rather than focusing exclusively on illocutionary acts.


Subject US presidential candidates' vice-presidential picks. Significance Although the political power of the vice-president (VP) has varied significantly in each administration, presidential candidates select running mates whom they believe will enhance the appeal of their tickets to undecided voters in the electorate or to shore up support from party constituencies after the primaries. To this end, Republican candidate Donald Trump chose Indiana Governor Mike Pence as a running mate and Democrat Hillary Clinton chose Virginia Senator Tim Kaine. Impacts Republicans' postures towards Trump's 2016 presidential campaign are likely to form a divisive party fault line in future election cycles. Clinton and Kaine's pro-trade tendencies will face significant public and congressional restrictions on advancing new agreements. Progressive Democrats are likely to have greater political clout as part of a Senate majority than in the Clinton White House.


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