Taking a Marked Stance through Evaluative Lexical Items: A Study of Selected Features of Obama’s and Trump’s Inaugural Speeches

Abstract

The paper presents an analysis of Obama’s and Trump’s inaugural addresses with a view to evidencing how language can be manipulated and also reveal the speaker’s political and ideological stance through the use of marked and evaluative lexical items. The language sample selected for analysis contains personal pronouns and possessive adjectives ‘you, your, we, us, our, ours, ourselves, they, their, them, themselves’, determiner ‘other’ and the term ‘America’ with all its derivative forms as used in the two speeches.