An Analysis of Donald Trump’s 2020 RNC Speech from the Perspective of Proximization Theory

Abstract

The cognitive turn of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) marks the commencement of Critical Cognitive Linguistics (CCL), offering a disciplined theoretical perspective on the conceptualized linguistic choices which are identified as potentially ideological. Based on the newly developed theory of proximization in CCL, this paper sets out to analyze Donald Trump’s Speech delivered at 2020 Republican National Convention. It finds out that the former U.S. president Donald Trump is most skilled at construing spatial proximization in the discourse space to legitimate his behavior and ideological manipulation is subtly achieved by him through his combined use of spacial, temporal and axiological proximization strategies.