AGENCY VS INCLUSION: A COMPARATIVE GENDERED MOOD ANALYSIS OF POLITICAL SELF-POSITIONING IN 2024 US NOMINATION SPEECHES OF TRUMP AND HARRIS

Abstract

The language of a political leader creates a subtle message of how he/she desires to be perceived. The current qualitative study adopts Donald Trump and Kamala Harris's 2024 nomination acceptance speeches at the Republican and Democratic National Conventions as its text sources, to explore how these two politicians constructed their political image with the use of the three types of mood (declarative, imperative, interrogative) and the modal verb. The study employs the framework of Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to identify and examine 20 purposively selected clauses from each speech in terms of agency and inclusion, mood and modality, Subject, Finite, and Residue structures. In applying Deborah Tannen's theory of gendered communication namely report-talk versus rapport-talk and status versus connection, it is investigated if these preferences reflect a gendered pattern of political communication. From the analysis, it appears that both speakers heavily rely on the declarative mood for assertion of confidence/commitment which is typically marked as modalized by “will” in the statements. There are differences, however, in the expression of agency and inclusion. In the service of personal commitment and collective language, Harris frequently employs hortative verbs like “let us.” Trump's speech is more a reiteration of his own promises and one call to action; it's rhetorical questions that confront critics, not the audience. The mood choices seem to not only communicate but to influence how each of the candidates establishes authority and connection. The results of this qualitative study involving a purposive sample are not intended to be generalized, but rather to provide a close, contextual reading of political self-positioning. By exploring the relationship between politics and grammar, the study adds to the fields of discourse analysis and gender studies.