What does it mean to speak presidentially?
Research output: Conference Papers (RGC: 31A, 31B, 32, 33) › 32_Refereed conference paper (no ISBN/ISSN) › Not applicable › peer-review
Author(s)
Related Research Unit(s)
Detail(s)
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 26 May 2017 |
Conference
Title | 62nd Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association |
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Location | City University of Hong Kong |
Place | Hong Kong |
Period | 26 - 28 May 2017 |
Link(s)
Permanent Link | https://scholars.cityu.edu.hk/en/publications/publication(6a9e8f34-f700-4149-9472-c256b7a24148).html |
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Abstract
US President Donald Trump’s recent speech to a joint session of Congress received positive feedback from some of his most vocal critics. Taking a variety of texts by way of comparison – including selected speeches of former US Presidents Barack Obama and Richard Nixon – we will discuss how the resources of language contributed to making Trump’s speech to Congress come across to critic and friend alike as ‘presidential’. Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) which prioritizes the study of function over form, provides the theoretical and methodological basis for investigating ‘the aesthetic and functional values that differentiate one text from another, or one voice from another within the frontiers of the same text’ (Halliday Collected Works, Vol. 2, chapter 6, p.187). Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), complements the clausal orientation of SFL by investigating the relations that occur between functionally-significant text spans at clause level and above.
Bibliographic Note
Full text of this publication does not contain sufficient affiliation information. Related Research Unit(s) information for this record is supplemented by the author(s) concerned.
Citation Format(s)
What does it mean to speak presidentially? / WEBSTER, Jonathan J.; Webster, Carol L. .
2017. Paper presented at 62nd Annual Conference of the International Linguistic Association, Hong Kong.Research output: Conference Papers (RGC: 31A, 31B, 32, 33) › 32_Refereed conference paper (no ISBN/ISSN) › Not applicable › peer-review