Deonticity in Donald Trump’s speeches

an ethos for each audience

Abstract

In this paper, we aim to describe and analyze the deontic modals expressions constituting President Donald Trump’s speeches, under a functionalist approach, according to the postulates of Hengeveld (2004) and Hengeveld and Mackenzie (2008). To understand the modality category, we will work with the Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG), which seeks to integrate the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects. Starting from the understanding that deontic modals expressions are at the service of argumentation, we will also take the concept of Discourse Analysis (AD) ethos to understand President Trump’s ethos, constructed discursively. Our corpus consists of four speeches, translated into Spanish, delivered by President Donald Trump after taking office, and disseminated on digital social media. We undertake reading of the speeches, according to the following aspects: (i) contextual: what is the theme of the speech and the type of audience to which the president is addressed; (ii) semantics: what is the installed semantic value and the source of the modal assessment; and (iii) discursive: what kind of ethos is projected by the speaker. We observed that the speeches aimed at a wide public, therefore more heterogeneous, favor the construction of attenuated deontic values, corroborating the construction of a non-authoritarian presidential ethos. In turn, speeches aimed at the American people, whose theme is the Trump administration platform, favor the construction of asserted deontic values, thus building an authoritarian image. We found that the semantic value of obligation and the deontic source of the enunciator type was the most frequent.