Language, Ideology and Argumentation in Obama’s and Trump’s Inaugural Speeches: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The present study analyzes Obama’s 2009 and Trump’s inaugural speeches to explore the linguistic, ideological and argumentative forms employed therein. Since inaugural speeches reveal text-deliverer’s incoming policies and principles upon which the upcoming administration is going to depend, the two presidents employed various strategies to represent and legitimize their ideologies and policies and win their audiences’ support for their incoming administrations. The questions that this study attempts to answer are related to the use of linguistic forms to design identities, the ideological strategies to propose visions, and the argumentative patterns and tools to validate the delineated identities and the proposed visions. To answer these questions, the current study adopts an eclectic approach comprising different models and approaches: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), Ideological Discourse Analysis (IDA), the Argumentative patterns by Van Eemeren and Henkemans (2017) and Philipp Breton’s (2006) argumentation strategies appealed to by politicians to construct and express their attitudes and judgments about the foregrounded topics in their speeches as well as those suppressed therein. More importantly, the study concludes that both speakers opted to positively represent themselves through employing various linguistic forms, such as transitivity and modality and lexicalization together with adopting various ideological strategies to emphasize their positive traits and de-emphasize the negative ones of their opponents; and these ideological strategies range from using similar techniques such as apparent honesty and altruism and dissimilar strategies such as using narrativization by Obama and populism by Trump. Moreover, they both strove to legitimatize their proposed ideas and constructed identities by resorting to employing various argumentative patterns and tools, which comprised four argumentative patterns on the part of Obama and three on that of Trump, and they appealed to authority, shared background, framing and analogy to validate the humanitarian approach of Obama and the isolationist, populist vision proposed by Trump.