A Study on Obama’s Optimistic Speech as Opposed to Trump’s Division Speech from a Systemic Functional Grammar Perspective

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Women for Arts, Science and Education, Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

The present study is a discourse analysis of Trump’s and Obama’s speeches on George Floyd’s death. The study investigates two concepts, namely; identity and ideology as constructed through the linguistic choices of the two leaders. To explore the identity and ideology of the two leaders, the study adopts a combined framework of Halliday’s (1994) Systemic Functional Grammar and Leech’s (1985) Componential Analysis Theory. The collected data are examined from a lexico-grammatical and semantic analysis. The lexicogrammatical analysis, on the one hand, is governed by Halliday’s SFG in which the ideational meta-function is explored through examining the transitivity system used by the two speakers. The semantic analysis, on the other hand, investigates the interpersonal meta-functions behind the two speeches through the six processes proposed by Halliday. This is in addition to a componential semantic analysis of the most frequently used nouns. The methodology involves a combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods through using corpus linguistic techniques. The data are processed using Sketch engine. Frequency lists, keywords and concordance results form the basis upon which discursive themes are determined, constructing the types of identities and ideology of both leaders. Results show that the two leaders aroused contrasting views and strong feelings.

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