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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 21, No. 0, pp.735-751
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2021
Received 15 Jun 2021 Revised 20 Aug 2021 Accepted 25 Aug 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.21..202108.735

A Critical Discourse Analysis of Donald Trump’s Speeches during the 2019/2020 American-Iranian Crisis

Basant S. M. Moustafa
Professor, Department of English language and Literature, College of Science and Humanities in Al-Kharj, Al-Kharj 11942, KSA; Department of English language and Literature, Faculty of Arts, Tanta University, Tanta 31511, Egypt b.moustafa@psau.edu.sabasant.moustafa@art.tanta.edu.eg


© 2021 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The current study is a critical exploration of Donald Trump’s speeches delivered during the 2019/2020 tensions between the USA and Iran. The study analyzes the speeches given by Trump in the course of these heated confrontations, using a synergy of two critical discourse analysis tools, i.e., Fairclough’s ten-question model (2001) and van Dijk’s Ideological Square (2006), to reveal the experiential, relational and expressive values in Trump’s language use as a way into exploring the interrelation between the discursive structure of the speeches and their ideological structure. The wordings and grammatical structures were examined to unveil the power strategies used by Trump in the two referred-to speeches. The results show that the speeches comprise perspicuous linguistic traces of Trump’s ideological underpinnings. Thus, the analytical tools yielded more insight into discursive and ideological structures. Moreover, the linguistic features used by Trump to exert power and build power relations in the speeches were revealed.

Keywords:

CDA, Trump’s speeches, American-Iranian crisis, Fairclough’s ten question model, van Dijk’s ideological square

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