| In the 2016 US presidential election,candidate Donald Trump often made the headline for his remarks.As giving public speeches is one of the major ways of communicating with voters,Trump's political speeches must have contributed to his victory.Therefore,the research question of this thesis is how discourse strategy helps Trump win popularity.Trump's discourse is analyzed by applying Norman Fairclough's three-dimensional framework and Halliday's functional grammar.This analyzing framework includes 3 stages: description,interpretation and explanation.In the first stage of description,the data will be analyzed according to three metafunctions of Halliday's functional grammar: ideational function,interpersonal function and textual function.The second stage of interpretation focuses on the production,communication and acceptance of the discourse by answering three questions: What's going on? Who is involved and in what Relations? What is the role of language in what is going on? The third stage explains how Trump designs his language strategy based on social context.It could be concluded that Trump has used some discourse techniques to achieve his political end.To be specific,Trump has used vocabulary and transitivity with personal characteristics.In addition to that,he has also used mood,personal pronouns and modal verbs to construct and adjust the relationship between the speaker and audience.As for textual function,marked theme is the technique used to emphasize important things.In a word,Trump's public speeches are carefully designed in an effort to cater to target voters.The significance of the research is that it is the first to analyze Trump's speeches from the perspective of critical discourse analysis,which may provide some inspirations for future studies in this aspect. |
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