Transitivity Analysis of Kamala Harris’ 2020 Presidential Victory Speech Concerning COVID-19

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.210427.002How to use a DOI?

Keywords

COVID-19, Kamala Harris, liberalism, political speech, transitivity system

Abstract

Language plays a vital role in political speech as it comes in a form of argument shaping and speech presenting which often contain a set of beliefs called ideology. It gets even more crucial when the speech is delivered as a presidential victory speech from developed countries such as the USA. Hence, investigation regarding presidential victory speech should be conducted. Regarding this, the present study aims to investigate the presence of political ideology in the USA 2020 vice president-elect Kamala Harris’ victory speech concerning her plans to build back the USA during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is due to the fact that not only she is the first female vice-president elect but she is also representing the people of colour. This study employs Qualitative Content Analysis (QCA) as the research method with Halliday’s transitivity system as the framework to analyse the data. The result shows that Kamala Harris implicitly demonstrates her liberalism ideology by inviting all the American people to not only focus on their own liberty but also others as well through the utilisation of Material (60%), Relational (19%), Mental (11%) and Behavioural (3%) processes in her speech. Thus, in other words, Kamala Harris plans to build back the USA by starting to enforce people’s liberty.

Copyright

© 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Alfath Eka Liani
AU  - Annisa Annidi
AU  - Yanty Wirza
PY  - 2021
DA  - 2021/04/28
TI  - Transitivity Analysis of Kamala Harris’ 2020 Presidential Victory Speech Concerning COVID-19
BT  - Proceedings of the Thirteenth Conference on Applied Linguistics (CONAPLIN 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 7
EP  - 13
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210427.002
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.210427.002
ID  - Liani2021
ER  -