Emotive Language in Political Discourse: A Linguistic Study

This study deals with emotive language as a tool in the hand of politicians to persuade their audience. It investigates the negative and positive attitudes expressed by Trump in his speech. It applies Martin and White’s appraisal model as a framework for mapping the types of attitude used by Donald Trump's Speech (2016). In addition, it investigates the negative and positive attitudes expressed by Trump in his speech. The results reveal that judgement is the most frequently used attitude in the speech under surveillance. There are 40 judgements in the speech with 52.45% of the total percentage. The results also show that the negative attitude prevails in Trump's speech over the positive one indicating his rejection to the current political party and the political situation of the government