Critical Discourse Analysis and Rhetorical Tropes in Donald Trump’s First Speech to the UN

Abstract

Language and politics go hand in hand and learning and comprehending political genre is to learn a language created for codifying, extending and transmitting political discourse in any text/talk. Drawing upon the theoretical framework of Fairclough’s CDA and Rhetoric, the current study aims at investigating Donald Trump’s First Speech, from the point of frequency and functions of some rhetorical strategies (Parallelism, Anaphora and the Power of Three, Antithesis and Expletive, etc.), Nominalization, Passivization, We-groups and Modality as well as Lexical and Textual Analysis, presented to the UN delivered on Sep. 19, 2017. Specifically, the study seeks to determine: (1) how President Trump succeeded in conveying his notions and assumptions to his intended audience, and in convincing and negotiating, (2) how he attempted to explicitly and implicitly pass his attitudes on his targets, and (3) how those orientations, intended notions and assumptions were seamlessly presented to his addressees in discoursal and lexico-grammatical levels; (4) and finally in this underlying trend how he achieved his own ends. The results of the study hope to enhance reading comprehension and writing in academic registers for EFL/ESL students.

On rhetorical appeals: Emotionalization and politicization of Russia’s Covid-19 vaccine ‘Sputnik V’ in the American and Russian news discourse

“…The identification of the journalist's and audiences' feelings occurred in the 'unification' strategy ('we-groups'). Derakhshani et al (2021) previously reveals unification strategy as a prominent technique used by politicians and rhetoricians in political and media texts (p. 1229). Fowler et al (2018) also claims that the inclusive pronoun 'we' establishes a 'personalized' linkage between orators and the audience and 'mystifies the responsibility ' of orators (p. 221).…”

“…Chto…?) make the speech more memorable; and help journalists build strong arguments (Derakhshani et al, 2021(Derakhshani et al, , p. 1231. Journalists use repetitions and parallel structures to attract attention to the points, thereby convincing the readers of their viewpoint.…”

Interpreting repetition expressions in the writing of Trump’s addresses during the Covid-19 pandemic

“…Previous studies tried to investigate the content of Trump's political speech texts and other US Presidents' rhetoric texts of similar context (Derakhshani, et al, 2021;Homolar & Scholz, 2019;Ivana & Suprayogi, 2020;Medvid et al, 2022) and provided some insightful inferences that the used rhetorical strategies related lexicogrammatical construction are intended to win a specific and targeted audience. In addition, within the context of social communication, speech strategies and tactics confirm their role and importance in establishing "the basis for the collaboration of society and the leader" (Medvid et all., 2022, p. 153).…”

Investigating Modality in Policy Texts: Corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Analysis of Modals in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

“…The research is grounded within the frameworks of CDA and corpus linguistics. CDA is an increasingly evolving field of study which underscores the relationship between discourse and notions like power, power abuse and domination in text/ talk (Derakhshani et al, 2021). It is best viewed as a shared perspective which encompasses a variety of approaches rather than being viewed as a school which is characterized by a unitary methodology or theoretical framework.…”