The Final Debates of US Presidential Candidates in 2020: A Macro and Micro Semantic Analysis
Authors
HUMAIRA JAMSHED, ATTIA ANWER ZOON and SAADIA FATIMA
Abstract
In the US presidential election campaigns, the presidential debatesplay a vital role in gaining the US citizens' acceptance and votes. The presidential candidates engage in a debate, related to the most controversial issues of the time and primarily try to persuade the undecided voters through their pragmatic propositions and political ideologies. This project is an effort to analyze the last US presidential debate for the election 2020 which was the last attempt of both presidential candidates to display rhetorical supremacy. The researcher has employed Van Dijk’s (1980) Theory of Semantic Macrostructures to construct the theoretical framework. The selected debate is analytically examined by observing semantic macro and micro- structures. Here, the macro level analysis deals with the presented themes and the lexical structures are examined during the micro-level analysis. The results of the selected debate’s critical discourse analysis highlight the ideological dichotomy of ‘Us’ vs ‘Them’ by Trump (Republicans) and Joe Biden (Democrats) through the macro and microstructure propositions and linguistics analyses. Also, through the analyses, the researchers have exhibited the political ideologies of both the candidates.
Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), USA Presidential Debate, Macro- Micro level analysis, Lexical structures, Donald Trump, Joe Biden.