Domination and Hegemony Language in Political Discourse: Case of Donald Trump's us Inaugural Speech

Notions of power and hegemony have been tackled by many linguists among those critical discourse analysts. Ruth Wodak, Norman Fairclough and Van Dijk elaborated perspectives of discourse influences on the listeners. For them, the objective of any political speech is to control the mind of the addressees when imposing over them an ideology; that is the expression of power and hegemony. In the case of the inaugural speech of Donald Trump, he expresses power over his people when imposing ideologies of union and commonness. That has been possible with the use of personal pronoun “we” which empowers those characters with its inclusive function. Also, his speech depicted aspects of hegemony expression; Trump expressed power and hegemony over his people when manipulating their understanding of his speech. Indeed, with the use of nominalization, temporal adverbs, intensifiers, adjectives and tenses (past and future), he succeeded to introduce himself as a charismatic leader who can bring positive change and reinforce hope and pride to Americans.