Donald Trump’s grammar of persuasion in his speech

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of the nature of propositions made in President Trump's persuasive, yet controversial speech on Jerusalem from the perspective of mood analysis. The interpersonal relationships between the speaker and the audience concerning the building of ethos, pathos, and logos are revealed. It applies a discourse analysis with a qualitative approach to see how the President grammatically composed his ethos, pathos, and logos clauses. The results show that in the speech: 1) the ethos clause was built by employing the declarative mood functioning as a statement to show his credibility; 2) the pathos clauses were composed by implementing two moods: mostly declaratives which mainly functioned as statements, and few imperative moods to arouse both positive and negative feelings of the audience; 3) and the logos clauses were composed by using the declarative moods functioning as statements to give bases for his argumentation. The high use of declarative moods indicated that he positioned himself as an information bearer, to shorten the gap between him and his audience. Grammatically, the controversial side of the speech was mostly featured by several clauses containing negative elements such as blaming and negative polarity, especially when talking about previous US presidents and governments.

Keywords

• Linguistics
• Ethos
• Pathos
• Logos
• SFL mood analysis
• Speech