CONTRASTING VISIONS OF UNIFICATION: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF REAGAN’S AND TRUMP’S INAGURAL ADDRESSES
CONTRASTING VISIONS OF UNIFICATION: DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF REAGAN’S AND TRUMP’S INAGURAL ADDRESSES

Summary/Abstract: The inaugural speeches of Reagan and Trump differ in cognitive structures, discourse-forming strategies, and linguistic means. The semantic dominant in Reagan’s discourse is "unity based on heroic continuity" versus "division" in Trump’s discourse with the "us-them" opposition. The conceptual architecture of Reagan's discourse is based on the clusters of"American uniqueness", "sense of national pride" and "continuity of the heroic past" with connotations of optimism versus "threat" and "protection" in Trump's discourse, implying pessimism. In Reagan's metaphors, 75 % of source domains serve as identifiers of positive emotions, compared to Trump's 77.7% of negatively connoted source spaces. The primary stylistic device in Trump's speech is explicit antitheses, implementing the strategy of constructing a "we-group" based on the opposition to "them", while Reagan’s antitheses are implicit, implementing a strategy of consolidation by cancelling negative propositions with affirmative ones denoting ways to compensate for negativity. Temporal deixis in Trump's speech actualizes the "past is bad" model in antithesis to "future is good". Reagan's temporal perspective of the future is conceptualized as a positively evaluated heroic past, using intertextual citations, paraphrases, allusions, and narratives. Trump builds an emotional connection stylistically, while Reagan does so lexically-semantically, operating not with forms, but with meanings in an ethos argumentative model, using complex syntactic structures, an intimate and narrative style, direct directives, and "I"-based personal dexis, implementing a strategy of unification via individualization. Trump employs a slogan-like style in a pathos argumentative model, relying on simple syntax accumulating stylistic devices, aimed at mass audience in a strategy of unification versus individualization.

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