Open AccessAn SFL Approach to Biden’s Inauguration Speech after Winning the Presidential Election: Compensation
Author(s) -
Reza Abbaszadeh
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of critical studies in language and literature
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2732-4605
DOI - 10.46809/jcsll.v3i1.118
Subject(s) - presidential election , democracy , presidential system , administration (probate law) , systemic functional linguistics , political science , graduation (instrument) , politics , political economy , law , psychology , linguistics , sociology , engineering , philosophy , mechanical engineering
The US election is an influential event, not just in the USA itself but in the world. The present study aims to analyze Joe Biden’s inauguration speech after winning the presidential election in January 2021 and becoming the 46th president of the United States. Moreover, this paper attempts to investigate the USA’s possible policies toward their own nation and, of course, the other countries. This analysis goes through predicting probable upcoming policies of Biden’s administration comparing to the previous president of the USA, Donald Trump, who breached several international agreements. To this end, Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1978; Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) has been employed in Biden’s first speech after winning the election and beginning of the democratic administration to observe his political intentions by means of a critical approach and using appraisal resources of Martin and White (2007) to clarify the attitude, graduation, and engagement of his speech. Overall, designating the number of vocabularies related to any of the mentioned appraisal resources, it is concluded that Biden’s tendency, based on his inauguration speech and the lexical and grammatical (‘lexicogrammar) choices, is to compensate Trump’s actions, such as breaching 2015 JCPOA agreement and breaking 2015 Paris Climate Accord, and make peace with whom Trump had fueled conflicts.