Abstract
[full article and abstract in English]
 Politicians invest a lot of time and effort to win elections and present themselves in the best possible manner. They use language strategies to present and legitimise themselves as the right choice. And if they are the right choice, then their opponent is obviously not, so while they are trying to acclaim themselves and their political party, they use strategies to delegitimise and attack their opponents and the policy they represent.
 This paper aims to conduct a critical discourse analysis of the speeches of the two main political opponents in the last elections in the USA, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The research gives an insight into the manipulative function of language and covers two aspects: the lexical-semantic and pragmatic aspect and is based on the supposition that the strategies politicians use while talking about themselves and describing their opponents differ. As expected, they use more positive terminology to talk about themselves and their policies, and negative terminology to criticise the opponent’s policy. They also employ different pragmatic strategies, such as intensifiers and inclusive pronouns, to involve the audience into the discourse and convince them in their arguments. Finally, although carried out on a relatively small corpus, the analysis gives an insight into the language techniques employed by politicians to legitimise themselves and delegitimise their opponent and thus win the elections.
Highlights
Presidential elections are important for every country’s transition and development and the focus of the whole nation during election time is on the main presidential candidates
This article aims to explain the relationship between discourse and social practices, so it is framed within the scope of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)
We provide a thorough lexico-semantic and pragmatic analysis of the two selected speeches in order to investigate the strategies of legitimization and delegitimisation employed by both speakers in their attempt to win the 2016 American presidential election
Summary
Presidential elections are important for every country’s transition and development and the focus of the whole nation during election time is on the main presidential candidates. Political parties invest a great deal of energy and finances to do the best presentation of their candidates to the electorate and hope to win the elections They even hire political and language experts to prepare or to help the candidate prepare their speeches or arguments in debates. They are very careful in selecting the appropriate language with which their candidate will present themselves and will comment on their opponents and the policies they represent As it is the case with all societies and elections, politicians always talk about themselves and their party in superlative but use rather negative and critical language to describe the opposing party and their opponent. Legitimisation deserves special attention in political discourse because it is from this speech event that political leaders justify their political agenda to maintain or alter the direction of a whole nation and, in the case of US leaders, the entire world (Reyes 2011: 783)
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