Speech Acts as a Strategy of Bias in Donald Trump’s Political Speeches

Abstract

This study deals with analyzing bias in selected political speeches delivered by Donald Trump in different occasions from a pragmatic perspective, namely speech act theory. The reason behind choosing this topic is that it has not been given its due attention, especially from a pragmatic perspective, to the best of the researcher’s knowledge. The study aims at finding out the pragmatic strategies, namely speech acts that American politicians exploit to issue bias in their political speeches. Six speeches have been chosen randomly to be analysed as far as types of speech acts are concerned. Data analysis is followed by a table and a figure to illustrate the frequency and percentage of the identified speech act. Finally, there are the main conclusions that the researcher arrived at.