Self-Framing and Other-(Re)framing in Institutional Political Discourse: The Case of Donald Trump’s Final Speech Before the UN
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1401.24Keywords:
context model, discursive strategies, ideology, sociocognitive approach, TrumpAbstract
The goal of this study is to provide a sociocognitive critical discourse analysis of Donald Trump’s 75th UNGA (The UN General Assembly) speech 2020 to demonstrate how Trump (re)framed America and other political actors. The study’s methodology has been divided into three stages: (a) identifying the speech’s macrostructures (major themes) embodying the speech’s global meanings, (b) analyzing the speech’s explicit and implicit local meanings, and (c) laying out Trump’s subjective context model. Findings revealed that (1) the semantic (cognitive) structure and textual arrangement of Trump’s speech are meant to draw attention to two ideologically opposed discourse worlds with skewed, hegemonic intergroup and outgroup representations; (2) a polarized context model, based on the WE/THEY schema, has motivated and controlled Trump’s speech for the purposes of persuading the audience, stigmatizing other social actors, and managing opinion formation; and (3) Trump’s context model has been shown to control the production of specific microstructures that correspond with a variety of discursive strategies.
References
Abidi, M. (2015). Euphemism in Tony Blair’s political discourse in the Iraqi War 2003: A sociocognitive CDA account. International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies, 2(1), 8-28.
Beard, A. (2000). The language of politics. Routledge.
Brown, G., & Yule, G. (1983). Discourse analysis. Cambridge University Press.
Brown, P., & Fraser, C. (1979). Speech as a marker of situation. In Scherer K. R., & Giles, H. (eds.), Social Markers in Speech (pp. 33-62). Cambridge University Press
Charteris-Black, J. (2011). Politicians and rhetoric: The persuasive power of metaphor. Palgrave Macmillan.
Chichon, J. P. (2019). (Mis)leading Britain’s conversation: The cultivation of consent on the Nigel Farage Radio Phone-in Show. Discourse and Communication, 14(1), 3-21. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481319876769
Chilton, P. (2017). Toward a neuro-cognitive model of socio-political discourse, and an application to the populist discourse of Donald Trump. Langage et société, 160-161(2), 237-249. https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.160.0237
Ghachem, I. (2015). A sociocognitive approach to agency framing in David Cameron’s 2010 preelection discourse. CADAAD Journal, 7(2), 263–282.
Gil-Bonilla, J. F. (2020). Critical discourse analysis of Trump across time. Darnioji daugiakalbystė - Sustainable Multilingualism, 16, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.2478/sm-2020-0001
Hart, C. (2014). Discourse, grammar, and ideology: Functional and cognitive perspectives. Bloomsbury publishing.
Ivana, P. S., & Suprayogi, S. (2020). The representation of Iran and United States in Donald Trump’s speech: A critical discourse analysis. Linguistics and Literature Journal, 1(2), 40-45. doi:10.33365/llj.v1i2.293
Khan, M. H., Adnan, H. M., Kaur, S., Qazalbash, F., & Ismail, I. N. (2020). A critical discourse analysis of anti-Muslim rhetoric in Donald Trump’s historic 2016 AIPAC policy speech. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 40(4), 543-558. doi:10.1080/13602004.2020.1828507
Kress, G. (1985). Ideological structures in discourse. In Van Dijk TA (eds.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis (pp. 27-42). Academic Press.
Lakoff, G. (1996). Moral politics: How conservatives and liberals think. University of Chicago Press.
Levinson, S. V., Parker, J., Williams, M. S. (2016). American conservatism: NOMOS LVI. New York University Press.
Li, L., & Gao, F. (2023). Contrasting semantic and sentimental features between Chinese and American economic news discourse in the epidemic era: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 7(1), 100435. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssaho.2023.100435
Padilla, C. M. (2014). Pragmatic failure, epistemic injustice and epistemic vigilance. Language & Communication, 39, 34-50. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2014.08.002
Pradiptha, W. A., Purwati, T., & Hadiati, C. (2020). Reflection of ideology: A critical discourse analysis of Donald Trump’s declaration speech of Jerusalem as capital city of Israel. J-Lalite: Journal of English Studies, 1(1), 1-22. doi:10.20884/1.jes.2020.1.1.2715
Quinonez, E. S. (2018). (Un)welcome to America: A critical discourse analysis of anti-immigrant rhetoric in Trump’s speeches and conservative mainstream media (unpublished master's thesis). California State University, San Bernardino, the US.
Salama, A. H. Y. (2011). The pluralist context model in Obama’s Cairo speech: A rhetorical semiotic-cognitive approach. ESP Across Cultures, 8,103-124.
Scanlan, C. (2003). Birth of the inverted pyramid: A child of technology, commerce and history. St. Petersburg, Fla.: The Poynter Institute. Retrieved on December 22, 2022 from http://www.poynter.org/2003/ birth-of-the-inverted-pyramid-a-child-of-technology-commerce-and-history/12755/.
Sclafani, J. (2017). Trump’s idiolect: Discourse marking. Talking Donald Trump, 21-42. doi:10.4324/9781315276885-2
Sowińska, A. (2013). A critical discourse approach to the analysis of values in political discourse: The example of freedom in President Bush’s State of the Union addresses (2001–2008). Discourse & Society, 24(6), 792-809. doi:10.1177/0957926513486214
Van Dijk, T. A. (1980). Macrostructures: An interdisciplinary study of global structures in discourse, interaction, and cognition. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1981). Episodes as units of discourse analysis. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Analyzing discourse: Text and talk (pp. 177-195). Georgetown University Press.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Elite discourse and racism. Sage.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1997). Cognitive context models and discourse. In M. I. Stamenov (Ed.), Language structure, discourse and the access to consciousness [Advances in Consciousness Research 12] (189-226). John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology – A multidisciplinary approach. Sage.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1999). Context models in discourse processing. In H. van Oostendorp, & R. S. Goldman (Eds.), The construction of mental representations during reading (pp. 123-148). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and context: A sociocognitive approach. Cambridge University Press.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2009a). Society and discourse: How context controls text and talk. Cambridge University Press.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2009b). Critical discourse studies: A sociocognitive approach. In R. Wodak, & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 62-86). Sage.
Van Dijk, T. A. (2015). Racism and the press. Routledge.
Van Dijk, T. A., & Kintsch, W. (1983). Strategies of discourse comprehension. Academic Press.
Vidrio, S. G. (2019). The affective dimension of social representations: Donald Trump and the social representation of illegal immigration. Papers on Social Representations, 28(2), 1-26.
Wang, Y., & Liu, H. (2017). Is Trump always rambling like a fourth-grade student? An analysis of stylistic features of Donald Trump’s political discourse during the 2016 election. Discourse & Society, 29(3), 299-323. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926517734659
Wilson, J. (1990). Politically speaking. Basil Blackwell.
Wodak, R. (1989). Language, power and ideology: Studies in political discourse. John Benjamins Publishing.
