A methodological synergy of dramatistic discourse analysis and corpus linguistics: From the discourse of US Presidents to Trump's 2016 Orlando speech

Abstract

The present study offers a novel methodology for corpus-based discourse analysis that combines Kenneth Burke's (1968, 1969) dramatistic method of text analysis and the corpus techniques of keyword extraction and concordance reading. Applying the methodology, a two-stage analysis of Donald Trump's 2016 Orlando speech has been conducted: First, at a micro level, identifying the keywords used by Trump in his speech as compared against the historical reference corpus of US Presidents through WordSmith Tools (Scott, 2012) as well as describing and interpreting Trump's keyword lexical structures in the pentadic ratios rhetorically motivated by the that select and deflect representations of the gay-nightclub-shooting event in the speech; second, at a macro level, substantiating the whole speech event of Orlando in terms of the different types of substance – geometric, familial, and directional – recognized in the keywords clustering and linking in the speech. The study has reached two findings. First, methodologically, synergizing Burke's dramatistic method of text analysis and corpus-linguistics techniques in a novel way that contributes to analysing the rhetorical language of political discourse, yielding a corpus-based dramatistic discourse analysis. Second, practically, analysing the pentadic ratios of the speech keywords and their substance types has revealed Trump's rhetoric of selecting and deflecting certain representations of the Orlando political event through a number of terministic screens and substantiations.