Study Of Deviation Of Donald J. Trump’s Campaign Speech From Perspective Of Register Theory

The U.S.presidential campaign speech is one of the most important electoral means to win votes and gets support from the voters.In 2016,Donald J.Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States.In his campaign speeches,he was speaking to the voters in a showbiz-style,even off the point.His campaign speeches appeared language deviations for many times,which made his speech more unique,more contagious and persuasive,so as to become the president of U.S.Register theory is one of the important theories in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics.It emphasizes that genre changes with context and it is restricted by context,which can be explained by three variables: field,tenor and mode.At present,there are few studies on the deviation of political discourse.This paper attempts to study the presidential campaign speeches delivered by Trump in 2016 by means of qualitative research and case study,from the perspective of register theory in Systemic Functional Linguistics.It focuses on the figuring-out of the following questions: Firstly,main types of deviation in Trump’s campaign speeches.Secondly,the reasons for the deviations appeared in campaign speeches,or the motivations.Thirdly,the applications of deviation in Trump’s campaign speeches,or the formation of deviation.To solve the above problems,the present research is carried out: first of all,this paper categorizes the deviations in Trump’s campaign speeches into three types: field deviation,tenor deviation,mode deviation according to three variables in register theory proposed by Halliday(1994)and eight types of deviations by Geoffrey N.Leech(1969)through the data collection from Trump’s campaign speeches in 2016.The second,the study explores motivations of deviations in Trump’s campaign speeches as follows: evoking of resonance,implicit expression of meaning,emotional convergence,values convergence and so on.And the research finds that Trump’s campaign speech and political discourses have something in common,as the deviation mainly attempts to make reasonable political views widespread by his speeches,thus lead the public opinion.Finally,this paper analyzes the deviations in the campaign speeches by the case study,and probes into its formation as register shift,register mixing and register borrowing.Register shift is shown by the topic shift and style shift;register mixing includes the discourse mixing and topic connotation mixing;register borrowing involves specific words borrowing and proverbs borrowing.This paper analyzes the deviations of Trump’s campaign speeches from the perspective of register theory,so as to understand how Trump conquers the masses with his speeches,and then strengthens the understanding of the Western political discourse,which is of both theoretical and practical values for the further study of political discourse.