Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump’s and Rouhani’s Words at the UN; A Study of Incorporation of Ideology and Power in Political Speeches

Adopting the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), the present study aims to critically analyze the discursive characteristics of the speeches of Donald Trump and Hassan Rouhani at the 72nd session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in September 2017 mainly from the point of transitivity and modality to have a better understanding of the political implications and purposes of these speeches, in general, and in particular, to discover how they manifest their ideology and power through language. Furthermore, we want to find out how they use the power of speeches to persuade the public to accept and support their policies.

Keywords:

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) , Systematic Functional Linguistics (SFL) , political speeches , ideology , transitivity , modality , Trump , Rouhani