Pragmatic Acts Analysis of Donald Trump’s “Save America” Speech

This study examines Donald Trump’s “Save America” speech delivered at Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021 to discuss how his language use strategically performs certain actions aimed to influence his supporters and give credence to his claims on the outcome of 2020 presidential election result. Data for the study are twenty-one excerpts that are purposively selected from the discourse and qualitatively analysed using insights from Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Acts Theory. Analysis focuses on identifying the speech’s dominant practs, the contextual resources through which these practs are derived, their functions, and effects on the audience. Findings reveal seven practs that are employed to perform different functions. These are ‘accusing’ employed to undermine the credibility of the election result, ‘informing’ to make the audience believe in his claims, ‘justifying’ to make his claims credible, ‘directing’ to encourage them to act, ‘warning’ to inform them about future consequences of any inaction, and ‘reassuring’ to convince them that they are together in the fight. These practs are realised through shared situational knowledge (SSK), relevance (REL), reference (REF), inference (INF), metaphor (MPH), and metapragmatic joker. This study contributes to political discourse studies by making explicit the linguistic mechanisms through which political actors achieve their goals.