Ideological Representations in the Nomination Acceptance Speeches of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton: A Contrastive Study

Abstract

The main objective of the study is to investigate and trace the ideological representations in the two speeches delivered by two candidates of two opposed American biggest parties for the American presidential election in 2016, the Republican nominee Donald J. Trump and the Democratic nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton. The study examines some selected samples from the two speeches by classifying them into three main themes: internal problems, foreign affairs, and immigration. The study focuses on examining the most prominent linguistic tools of Trump Clinton during their presidential elections. Besides the study investigates how the language structures construct the speakers’ ideologies. Thus, the study applies two models for the verbal analysis: the ideological square model of Dijk (2006a) and the ideological structure and strategies model of Dijk (2006b) along with Kress (2010) multimodal social semiotics approach for the nonverbal analysis to make the audience more aware of the speakers’ hidden ideologies and language manipulation in their speeches. Hypothesis of the Study The hypothesis of the study tests the discourse can reveal politicians’ hidden ideologies, their political aims, and can have a great influence on shaping the ideology of the community. Thus, the study examines this hypothesis in the two speeches delivered by two prominent political speakers whose speeches have discourse elements in common as each candidate presents his/her political party ideologies. As a result, the main aim of the study is to investigate the ideological polarization techniques practiced by the two speakers in their discourses. Thus, the study particularly focuses on investigating the polarizing elements of the two candidates. It also examines how the speakers’ discursive practices help to manipulate the audience to gain their votes. Data Collection

The data analysis in this study includes two nomination acceptance speeches. Trump gave the speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Thursday, July 21, 2016, at 06:21 PM EDT in Cleveland, Ohio. It lasts for 60:14 minutes. The 5.092-word speech is collected from The New York Times website https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/22/us/politics/trump-transcript-rnc-address.html. On the other hand, Clinton gave the speech at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) on Thursday, July 28, 2016, at 10:28 PM EDT in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It lasts for 56:34 minutes. The 5.389-word speech is collected from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/29/us/politics/hillary-clinton-dnctranscript.html