Discourse in Matrix of Power: The Textual Analysis of First Presidential Speech by Donald. J. Trump at White House in the Context of Norman Fairclough’s Modal of Three Levels of Discourse

Abstract

This research study aims at the analysis of President Donald. J. Trump’s political discourse (his speech) delivered at White House, America on Jan 30, 2018, by discussing it as power discourse. It focuses upon the linguistic and stylistic analysis of president’s political discourse. Hence, the research probes into the detail analysis of how in his speech Donald has used different sentence structures, repetitions, ellipses, parallelism, political jargon, technical vocabulary, figurative language and many other linguistic features. Furthermore, the researcher has also analyzed his speech from the angel of discourse properties his speech exhibits. Since discourses are shaped by power and positioning of the socially conditioned status of the persons, the researcher argues here that his political discourse actually demonstrates Trump’s power position and his ideology as expressed in his speech. Besides, Norman Fairclough’s modal of three levels or dimensions of discourse (Description, interpretation and explanation) has been taken as a theoretical framework of this research study to analyze his speech. The research probes into the detail analysis of how he uses repetitions, ellipses, parallelism, political jargon, anaphoric and anaphoric references in his speech. This is a qualitative research in design and is based on the descriptive analysis. The interpretive analysis as a method has also been adopted to interpret Donald’s speech in framework presented by Fairclough. The significance of the research lies in the fact that it contributes to the field of to the body of Stylistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Political and Visionary Discourse and modern literary theory.