Functional and Linguistic Characteristics of Donald Trump’s Victory and Inaugural Speeches

Abstract

The current research is devoted to the comparative and contrastive analysis of Donald Trump’s victory and inaugural speeches. Its objective is to identify their similarities and differences from the functional and linguistic points of view. The research consists of several stages. First, the two genres of discourse in question are defined. Then, an overview of their functions is provided. Next, the linguistic means of performing them are analyzed. The results of the research indicate that, due to their main goals, the genres in question express certain functions, which can be verbally expressed in various ways: in Trump’s victory speech the inspirative function comes to the fore, while in his inaugural address the integrative and the performative functions dominate the other ones. Furthermore, in each case linguistic peculiarities correlate with the functions: in the victory speech the focus is on the ‘greatness’ of everything and everyone, whereas in the inaugural speech words connected with patriotism prevail, which is expressed mostly by means of personal pronouns. The results of the current research may function as a basis for further analysis of the genre of the victory speech, as it has not received enough scholarly attention yet, and of the peculiarities of Donald Trump’s political discourse.