Abstract
Presidential debate is actually a crutial part of political campaign to attract public sympathy. The candidates do various debate techniques to persuade the audience to know the true personality. This project is purposed to analyse the political discourse through the examination of four representative linguistic features of van Dijk employed by two candidates (Donald Trump and Joe Biden) in the 2020 United States Presidential Debates. Aspects that observed are: personal pronouns, three part-list,,, fillers, and interruprions.. Those four structures are used to analyze the reproduction of 6 issues : Trump’s and Biden’s record, The Coronavirus, The Economy, The Supreme Court, Race and Violence in American Cities, and Election Integrity. The result indicates that both of them mock each other using sarcasm. Trump made lots of interruptions while Biden was expressing his opinion, so Biden rebuked him by saying "Will you shut up, man?" Otherwise, Trump mocks Biden much more, such as : “You graduated last in your class not first in your class.” etc. Both used repetition of sentences as a form of emphasis on their political views. Trump and Biden use Personal Pronoun “I and we” as positive self-presentation and use “you and he” as negative other-presentation. One interesting thing, Trump called his rival with his nick name, Joe, an unsual habit in formal speech or debate, both in first and final debate. To conclude, the findings of this study appeared to be in harmony inequality and justifying social power ditribution, the researcher recommends futher investigation of presidential debates in varying culture based on Van Dijk ‘s model or other models of CDA
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