Critical Discourse and Event Semantics Analyses of D. Trump’s Statement on the Armenian Genocide

Abstract

The paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the US President D. Trump’s statement on the Armenian Genocide. Our research is based on some principles of the discourse analytical theories covering the fields of semantics, pragmatics and political discourse. Critical Discourse Analysis is applied for analyzing political discourse and mostly studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context. As for the event semantics analysis we employ the socalled Event Structure Approach focusing on causative constructions which refer to predicates formed by a combination of a causative event and an underlying predicate. Hence, two types of linguistic theories are applied for enclosing the hidden subtexts of the president’s intentions along with maneuvering strategies.