Comparing Discourses in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s Speeches on ‘War on Terror’

Ardilla, Maulia Puteri (2023) Comparing Discourses in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s Speeches on ‘War on Terror’. Diploma thesis, Universitas Andalas.

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Abstract

These discourses on the ‘war on terror' delivered by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is discussed in this study. To achieve the objectives of the study, the researcher used the theory of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) theory by Halliday to find out the ideational meaning of the two speeches delivered by the two US presidential candidates. The research was conducted by identifying each clause of the two speech discourses. To identify the elements of transitivity in the two speeches by the presidential candidate, the researcher used a qualitative approach assisted by descriptive statistical methods to find out the distribution of functions and elements of transitivity in the two speech discourses. Each discourse is grouped into clauses. Then, each clause is identified based on its transitivity elements. As for the process, participants and circumstances of the clause, its occurrence is counted and the percentage is calculated. The results showed that there were 168 processes obtained from the two speeches, 102 of which were processes in Trump's speech and 66 were processes proposed by Hillary. The 102 processes in Trump's speech included material process (66.67%), mental process(17.64%), relational process (10.78%), verbal process (3.92%), and existential process (0. 98%). While the 66 processes in Hillary's speech included material process with percentages (66.07%), mental process (12.12%), relational process (16.67%), behavioral process (1.51%) and verbal process. (4.54%). The dominant process in the two speech discourses was the material process with a percentage (66.07%). The next dominant processes are mental process (15.47%), relational process (13.09%), verbal process (4.17%), material process (0.59%) and behavioral process (0.59% ). The existential process and behavioral process are found to be the least occurring processes in both speech discourses. Participants who were involved in the material process also dominated the two speech discourses, namely actor participants with a percentage (23.15%). The results showed that there were 89 elements of circumstances that were obtained from the two discourses of the speech, 62 of which were circumstantial elements in Trump's speech and 27 were proposed by Hillary. The results of this study also proved that Donald Trump used a material process to describe the negative image of terrorists. The same thing was also found in Hillary Clinton's speech which also used a material process in conveying a negative image of terrorists. This indicated that the two figures condemn acts of terror and terrorist(me) in the world.

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