An Analysis Of Trump’s Political Speeches From Peirce’s Semiotic Triads

As a new subject in the field of contemporary social science,semiotics provides an understanding tool with methodological significance for the development of various theories,and its research scope involves the essence,characteristics and changing law,the meaning of signs and the relationship between signs and human beings.Peirce was a philosopher,logician,and founder of pragmatism in the United States at the end of 19 th century and early 20 th century.The ―triadic theory‖ of Peirce’s semiotics provides a very explanatory power for political speeches.This thesis uses Peirce’s semiotics ―triadic theory‖ to study US president Trump’s speech,aiming to provide a new perspective for analyzing political speeches.The American presidential political speeches can be said to be the typical material in English discourse,which is of great research value.Political speeches are verbal communicative activities aimed at the masses,and the president’s political speeches are of authority to a certain degree.The reasons why this article takes US President Trump’s political speeches as the object of analysis is that;first,US president Trump has been the focus of attention since his successor,and political speeches are highly powerful verbal interaction.Second,Trump’s political speeches are regarded as text because of its wide range of applications.However,due to the limitation of space,this thesis only selects and analyzes the most representative speeches in Trump’s political speeches including: inaugural speech,military speech,diplomatic speech,domestic speech these four discourse types based on Peirce’s semiotics.This thesis selects the triadic theory of Peirce’s semiotics to analyze the political speeches based on the following aspects: first,Peirce’s semiotics aims to study all symbols,not only verbal signs but also non-verbal signs;second,there are not many articles on the usage of Peirce’s triadic theory to analyze political speech in the field of semiotics.This also provides a new perspective for future research;finally,the relevant theories of Peirce’s semiotics are applicable to discourse analysis,which provides a theoretical support for the further study of symbolic phenomena in discourse analysis.The conclusions of this study are as follows: first,Peirce’s semiotics can not only analyze verbal signs,but also apply to non-verbal signs.Second,it is a feasible method to analyze political speech with Peirce’s ―triadic theory‖.The analysis of political speeches mostly stay in the form of political speech,characteristics and other aspects of the study.In the past,most of the research on political speeches from the traditional linguistics,such as vocabulary,sentences and so on,but it is difficult to study thoroughly from the lexicon and syntax point of view.The study of Peirce’s semiotics is chosen because it is an authoritative semiotic theory,and few scholars study it deeply and apply it to Trump’s political speeches.The contributions of this thesis are as follows: first,Peirce’s semiotics is often used to analyze literary works or poems,and this thesis uses it to analyze political speeches which enlarge the research field of Peirce’s semiotics.Second,the combination of Peirce’s semiotics with the president’s speeches in the United States provides guidance for analyzing the linguistic meaning in discourse.Third,choosing political speeches by US President Trump could further dissect the political aims and intentions of political speeches.