Speech acts of attack in American presidential debates: a pragmatic study

الملخص EN

The current research is concerned with a pragmatic study of attack acts that are used by President Donald Trump during the American Presidential Debate in 2020 with his counterpart Joe Biden.

Attack is an attempt to harm or defeat someone, and it is a bold message that the speaker or attacker does not like or disagree with the other antagonist.

By the end of the study, it is expected to answer the following questions: What are the pragmatic aspects of attack acts used in presidential debates of American President Donald Trump? What are the reasons behind attacking in the political debates? How do attack acts of President Trump convey, directly or indirectly? The research aims to identify the usage of attack acts in American Presidential Debate in 2020 by presenting an extensive theoretical framework and investigating how the president utilizes attack acts as a helpful tool to achieve specific purposes.

It also aims to show the negative impact of the attack on the audience who watch him.

In light of the abovementioned aims, the research hypothesizes that: first, there are some reasons that motivate President Trump to use attack in his political debate.

Second, direct speech acts are more frequently used than indirect ones in the attack of President Trump.

In order to achieve the aims and verify the validity of the hypotheses of the study, the researcher has adopted a model based on Searle's (1975) "Speech Acts".

The results of the research reveal that there are pragmatic aspects in language that can affect the usage of attack acts in political debates of American president Trump like eye contact, facial expressions and body language.

The analysis also shows that the acts of attack which are identified to express the function of speech that is performed by Donald Trump, it is noticed that Trump conveys his speech directly to convey his beliefs, attitudes and opinions during his debate with the other opponent, Joe Biden.

Also, he uses direct language to represent the factual, supportive and informative nature of the attacker.