Donald Trump’s grammar of persuasion in his speech

Achmad Fanani,Slamet Setiawan,Oikurema Purwati,Maisarah Maisarah,Uswatun Qoyyimah

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e03082

Achmad Fanani, Slamet Setiawan + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e03082

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Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the nature of propositions made in President Trump's persuasive, yet controversial speech on Jerusalem from the perspective of mood analysis. The interpersonal relationships between the speaker and the audience concerning the building of ethos, pathos, and logos are revealed. It applies a discourse analysis with a qualitative approach to see how the President grammatically composed his ethos, pathos, and logos clauses. The results show that in the speech: 1) the ethos clause was built by employing the declarative mood functioning as a statement to show his credibility; 2) the pathos clauses were composed by implementing two moods: mostly declaratives which mainly functioned as statements, and few imperative moods to arouse both positive and negative feelings of the audience; 3) and the logos clauses were composed by using the declarative moods functioning as statements to give bases for his argumentation. The high use of declarative moods indicated that he positioned himself as an information bearer, to shorten the gap between him and his audience. Grammatically, the controversial side of the speech was mostly featured by several clauses containing negative elements such as blaming and negative polarity, especially when talking about previous US presidents and governments.

Highlights

This paper is an investigation into the nature of propositions made in President Trump's speech on Jerusalem delivered on December 6, 2017 (Trump, 2017), from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)
In connection with the results of the previous researches outlined in the literature review, this study identifies three aspects of SFL in the speech that are interesting to discuss: the high use of declarative moods, various speech-function realizations, and negative elements in the clauses
From the results of the study, it can be concluded that (1) the ethos clause was built by employing the declarative mood functioning as a statement to show his personal credibility; (2) the pathos clauses were composed by implementing two moods: mostly declarative, which mainly functioned as statements, and few imperative moods to arouse both positive and negative feeling of the audience; (3) and the logos clauses were composed by using the declarative moods functioning as statements to give bases for his argumentation

Summary

Introduction

This paper is an investigation into the nature of propositions made in President Trump's speech on Jerusalem delivered on December 6, 2017 (Trump, 2017), from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The speech was a persuasive yet controversial one. It was persuasive since he used it to persuade the audience to agree with his decision. This speech can be categorized as an analytical exposition whose purpose is to persuade that something is the case (Coffin, 2004). The speech was controversial because it had received a positive response from the President's supporters but got adverse reactions from his rivals which strengthened tensions across the Middle East (Sofos and Felci, 2017). Because of its persuasive and controversial values, the speech is worth analyzing

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