A Short Analysis Of Abraham Lincoln's Political Speech

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Key words: discourse analysis, political speeches, syntax, transitivity, grammatical cohesion. Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze Donald Trump’s and Abraham Lincoln’s presidential speeches mainly from the point of syntactic peculiarities in which we can examine what is talked about and how it is presented by political leaders. This study is based on M.A.K. Halliday’s grammar model – the Systematic Functional Grammar which is a schemata for syntactic analysis of the political speeches. Moreover , we can achieve a better understanding of the political purpose of these speeches. Introduction Politics is a scene where certain political, social and economic ideas are put into practice in order to fight for the power. As one of the most famous British politician, Winston Churchill, delivered a speech in which he highlighted the significant peculiarities of politics: “You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, …show more content…

He uses the first person plural personal pronoun 47 times and refers to the different subjects. The most dominating meaning of the pronoun “we” is a reference to the local community. When Trump says “Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for many, many years to come. We will face challenges, we will confront hardships, but we will get the job done” the pronoun makes reference to the future teamwork of government and American citizens as united society. Next, in the sentence “We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams. We will build new roads and highways and bridges and airports and tunnels and railways all across our wonderful nation. We will get our people off of welfare and back to work” is referring to his team and new administration that work with him