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

Abstract

The study examines the correlation between language and ideology through critical discourse analysis and semiotics of two nomination acceptance speeches of the 2016 American election. It is an interdisciplinary study that combines different fields: ideology, ideological structures, and semiotics. Through a comparative analysis between the speeches of two nominees who run for the American presidency: the Republican candidate, Trump, and the Democratic candidate, Clinton, the study explores the ideological polarization of the self and Other presentations that each candidate applies concerning three themes: internal problems, foreign affairs, and immigration. Besides, the internal problems theme is sub-classified into five sub-issues: crime, violence, economy, American rights, and health care. In this regard, the study focuses mainly on uncovering the hidden ideologies that each speaker utilizes either verbally and nonverbally to reveal how far each speaker can successfully manipulate the language and utilize signs to serve his/her political intentions. Therefore, the ideological square model of Dijk (2006a) is utilized for the verbal analysis to provide an analysis of polarization techniques of the self and Other. The ideological structures and strategies model of Dijk (2006b) is also applied to do a linguistic analysis along with Kress (2010) multimodal social semiotic approach for the nonverbal analysis. The study revealed that Trump and Clinton are varied in presenting self and Other presentations. For the nonverbal analysis, Trump concentrated more on denigrating the negative Other-presentation than boasting the positive self-presentation. On the other hand, Clinton focused on lauding the positive self-presentation than disparaging the negative Other-presentation. However, they both agreed on neglecting the mention of the good properties of the out-group and the bad properties of the in-group. Concerning to the nonverbal analysis, Trump and Clinton also utilize more semiotic modes to boast the self-presentation and perform fewer semiotic modes that denigrate the Other-presentation. On the contrary, Clinton focuses on emphasizing the positive self-presentation than disparaging the negative Other-presentation. Besides, the study introduced a modified model that helps to analyze nomination acceptance speeches verbally and nonverbally.