Negation in American Discourse: A Socio-Cognitive Study

Abstract

The present study cognitive aims to investigate the negation phenomenon in American political discourse under Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) principles. The research sample includes two speeches given by Clinton and Trump in their election campaigns in 2016. Since the nature of the study follows the social-cognitive approach, the researcher adopted two models of analysis to achieve the study’s objectives: First, the theoretical framework of MST (developed by Fauconnier (1994), Fauconnier and Sweetser (1996) to examine meaning construction resulting from building different levels of negative mental spaces by two different genders the selected speeches. Second, pragmatic model to examine the role of gender from the functional perspective of negation, five pragmatic strategies here are adopted, namely, Speech Act, off-record, on-record, presupposition (based on the politeness model of Brown and Levinson, 1987), and violation of Grice’s maxims (1975). The study follows a qualitative method in the analytical interpretation of data to understand the negative impact of a contextual model and subjective model (personal ideology and knowledge) and quantitative analysis to find out the frequencies and the types of negatives. The findings show that both genders are biased to use negatives in their election campaigns to damage f each other’s face, and both similarly succeed in using pragmatic strategies within the scope of negative spaces, with some differences to mention.