A pragmatic Study of Tautology in Trump's Political Speech

Abstract

This study is extracted from an MA thesis entitled "A Pragmatic Analysis of Tautology in Some Selected American political Speeches". The current study analyzes tautological devices in Tump's political speech, the previous American president. It aims to explore the most prominent linguistic structural types of tautologies in the political speeches selected for the study of pragmatic aspects of tautologies in political discourse and study the most adequate pragmatic theories that can be best used to the analysis of the pragmatic functions of tautologies of political discourse.

The study hypotheses that redundancies are the most prominent linguistic structural types of tautologies in the political speech. Searle`s (1969) speech acts and Grice`s (1975) cooperative maxims are the most adequate pragmatic theories that can be best used to the analysis of the pragmatic functions of tautologies of political discourse, and tautologies in political discourse can be pragmatically analyzed to in consideration of three metafunctions: ideational (pragmatic), textual (linguistic), and interpersonal (output).

The study adopts an eclectic model for the analysis of data which consists of surface and deep levels. In the surface level, there is analysis of different types of linguistic tautology of Moore`s (2001) types that resembles the textual metafunction. In the deep level, there is a pragmatic analysis as associated with the pragmatic functions of tautologies in political speech.

To achieve its aims, the study analyzes the selected data qualitatively, then there is a statistical study based on quantitative analysis to enhance the findings of the empirical study.