Legitimation and Manipulation in Political Speeches: A Corpus-based Study

摘要

Legitimization is the process through which certain ideologies are made legitimate within the norms and values of a given society. It is a process by which certain events or actions are normalized by virtue of the authority one holds. Through legitimization practices, politicians are provided with the means of offering implicit reasons to complete their actions through using certain discursive tools. This study examines the language of Trump’s speech before his supporters stormed the Capitol. This is done with the aim of investigating the legitimation discursive tools employed throughout which eventually led to the attack. The analysis is employed through utilizing van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework (2008). Within this framework, van Leeuwen offers four main legitimation strategies (1)authorization, (2)evaluation, (3)rationalization, and (4)mythopoesis. A tag set of these categories is created and annotated into the corpus chosen for this corpus based study and later retrieved using a concordance programme.