Language and Power in Presidential Speech Campaign Discourse: Donald Trump vs. Hillary Clinton

Abstract

This paper is dealing with the discussion of concepts and theoretical constructs that have contributed to a clear portrait of the relationship between language and power regarding types and functions of speech acts or language use. The description of the discussion based on Austin’s central innovation, that is, acts done in speaking mainly the sort of actions to use the performative sentence. This research is a descriptive qualitative, and the research instrument is documentation. The data was, then, taken from official website issuing the debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This research is, firstly, aimed at finding out the nuance of language and power based on the speech acts type and functions uttered by influential figures of the United States of America. Secondly, this is to investigate what and how the illocutionary speech acts work to manifest the power of language. The result shows that most of the types and functions of the speech acts are directive, expressive, commissive and declarative. Donald Trump tends to be more directive. Unlike Donald Trump, Clinton is more indirect and tends to be expressive.