A Corpus-based Study of Metafunction in American Presidential Debates

Study of Meta function in American Presidential Debates

Abstract

This study attempts to carry out an analysis of three American presidential debates
between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton that took place before US elections 2016.
The debates have been analyzed by applying Systemic Functional Grammar in order to
undergo Critical Discourse Analysis by using corpus based approach. Interpersonal
metafunction of Halliday‘s (2001) SFG (now onwards used for Systemic Functional
Grammar) has been used to study and further interpret the implications of choosing
lexico-grammatical tools like modal verbs, modal adjuncts and personal pronouns. The
findings show that interpersonal metafunction is a part of political discourse intending to
gain public favors by influencing opinion, establishing speaker‘s own assertiveness,
drawing public attention towards the issues highlighted by them. In addition, the
politicians exploit these metafunctional resources of language to defend their positions
also. It is also revealed that Hillary Clinton was found more assertive, determined and
committed in the course of debates for making more use of modal auxiliaries and first
personal pronoun while Donald Trump was found more judgmental, evaluative and
straight forward on the basis of frequent use of modal adjuncts and second personal
pronoun.