A Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump and Biden in their presidential debate on the Basis of Van Leeuwen’s Socio-semantic Model

Critical Discourse Analysis uncovers the linguistic techniques as well as social actions which are used to promote the ideas including injustice, dominance, discrimination, and highly opinionated and prejudiced beliefs, which have dominated all the social roles in any society. This study sought to analyze the U.S. presidential debate’s speech in 2020 between D. Trump and J. Biden on the basis of Van Leeuwen’s Socio-semantic model. Accordingly, all the speech was thoroughly scrutinized and all the sentences were completely analyzed. The article aimed to provide answers to the questions below: 1) how is the speech given by both parties analyzed? 2) is the socio-semantic model of VanLeeuwen (2008) alone sufficient to analyze the speech and elicit the underlying ideology? The results indicated that Trump’s speech enjoyed a 41.08 percent degree of mystification, illustrating he was almost explicit in his beliefs; whereas, Biden used 33.28 percentage of mystification to perceive that J. Biden has been more truthful emphasizing on the tragic way of Trump's reciprocation with Corona Virus, not having a clear plan (which is mentioned about 4 times directly and indirectly), referring to bleach injection, precisely usage of the word ineptitude, and bribing are pointed out by Biden's speech and using some adjectives such as catastrophic, horrible, calling opponent as super predator, and their plans as the craziest ones are brought up by Trump. This study endeavored to demonstrate how linguistic structures are controlled by socio-semantic features and how these features, in turn, are controlled by ideology. Ideology, in turn, is also dominated by power relations in a wider scale. The results, also, enlightened us with knowing the fact that Van Leeuwen's sociosemantic model is alone enough to analyze the speech.

Keywords:

Biden , critical discourse analysis , Presidential debate , socio-semantic , Trump , Van Leeuwen