A Text Linguistic Analysis of President Donald Trump's 2025 Inaugural Speech
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.64137/31078729/IJLLH-V2I3P107Keywords:
Text Linguistics, Cohesion, Coherence, Stylistics, Political Discourse, Inaugural SpeechAbstract
This study presents a text-linguistic analysis of the 2025 inaugural speech of Donald Trump. It focuses on the structural and stylistic features of the text. The study examines the patterns of cohesion and coherence, together with reference, substitution, conjunction, repetition, and lexical choice, in order to determine how unity is achieved in the text. Also, attention is given to sentence structure, thematic progression, modality, and rhetorical devices such as parallelism and contrast. The findings reveal that Trump’s speech makes extensive use of inclusive pronouns, declaratives, and patterned repetition in order to reinforce authority, project confidence, and promote a sense of collective national identity. The investigation concludes that certain deliberate linguistic choices helped to enhance the persuasive force of the address and demonstrate how textual organisation contributes to meaning, emphasis, and ideological positioning in modern presidential discourse.
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