A Critical Discourse Analysis On Donald Trump's Election Speeches

Fowler and other linguists in the 1970 s proposed the critical discourse analysis and aimed to explore the relationship between discourse,power and ideology.Fairclough has made outstanding contributions to critical discourse analysis,including the three-dimensional model theory.Three-dimensional theory is often used in the research of critical discourse analysis,especially in the analysis of English news reports.With Fairclough's(1989)three-dimensional model as the theoretical framework and Halliday's(1985)three meta-functions as the main language analysis tools,the study uses the platform github on foreign website www.presidency.ucsb.edu to select Trump's 50 election speeches from August 26,2015 to November 9,2016 as corpus,and to give a critical discourse analysis on Trump's election speeches.By using software Ant Conc as the quantitative analysis tool,the study analyzes Trump's election speeches and illustrates how political speaker uses language to influence his audience to achieve his political goals.At the description stage,the study aims to explore how Trump shows the linguistic feature of his 50 election speeches by using ideational meta-function and textual meta-function;at the interpretation stage,the study aims to investigate how Trump establishes the relationship between the audience and him by using interpersonal meta-function;at the explanation stage,the study aims to explain how Trump constructs power and social identity by using textual meta-function.The results show that at the stage of description,Trump uses all types of the transitivity.However,the proportions are different with regard to ideational meta-function.Material process is used most frequently in Trump's election speeches,which is 52%;mental process is the second and relational process is the third;verbal process,behavioral process and existential process are used the least in the speeches.Material processes are more capable of embodying the actions of implementers than other processes.The material process in the first place reflects Trump's attention to the description of the implementer's actions to achieve his political goals.Trump achieve his political goals by the usage of passivation and nominalization.And for interpersonal meta-function,Trump uses “will” and“would” frequently in the positive forms to express his abilities,determination and confidence;the plural form of the first-person pronouns “we” and “us” is used very frequently to shorten the distance to the audience.Compared with the firststage,this stage puts more emphasis on the discourse discursive.At the stage of interpretation,Trump uses language features and strategies to express his politic intentions to the audience by discussing the topic at home and abroad in his election speeches.Meanwhile,he also shortens the distance to the audience.At the stage of explanation,Trump builds power and identity through the use of language features and social factors.The author hopes that by the analysis of election speeches,the paper can help people realize that the political speaker uses language to influence the ideology of the audience to achieve his political goals.At the same time,it intends to enhance the public's critical language awareness so that people take a critical attitude to discourses.