Discursive strategies in western political discourse : nationalism and immigration

Abstract EN

The current study is an attempt to reveal hidden nationalist attitudes in the political discourse of the American right-wing party in the USA using critical discourse analysis.

The study aims at identifying the discursive strategies used in political discourse with regards to nationalism and immigration, investigating the construction of in-groups and out-groups, clarifying the positive self-presentation and negative others presentation, showing the most common warrants used to justify nationalist rhetoric against immigrants and, setting conclusions.

In order to achieve the aims of the study, it is hypothesized that (i) Discursive strategies are used to construct immigrants as out-groups and political actors and their allies as in-groups (ii) Political actors use positive self image to present themselves and negative others to present immigrants.

(iii) political actors use criminalization ideologies to justify their nationalist discourse against immigrants.

In order to achieve the aims of the present study, the following procedures are followed (i) Data is selected from the YouTube which is a press conference for the American right-wing president, Donald Trump (ii) The data has been analyzed linguistically to show discursive strategies used by Trump with regards to nationalism and immigration (iii)The model adapted for this study is DHA to CDA; Reisigl and Wodak (2001, 2009).

The study comes up with these conclusions (i) Results of the study verify all the hypotheses set forward (ii) Trump names immigrants as part of out-group and his people as in-group (iii) Trump presents immigrants with negative others image and present himself with positive self-image(iv)Nationalism in the USA is a civic nationalism.