A Critical Discourse Analysis of Trump’s Speech Regarding Iran’s Nuclear Deal on the Basis of Van Leewen’s Socio-semantic Model

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) discloses manipulative texts and intends to empower the reader to discriminate between convincing, well-founded argument and fallacious misconduct. It also raises awareness of the manipulation and the exploitation of the texts, which seem natural to the readers. CDA uncover the linguistic techniques as well as social actions which are used to promote the ideas including injustice, dominance, discrimination, and highly opinionated and prejudiced beliefs, which have dominated all the social roles in any society. This study sought to analyze the U.S. president’s speech regarding Iran’s nuclear agreement on the basis of Van Leewen’s Socio-semantic model. Accordingly, all the speech was thoroughly scrutinized and all the sentences were completely analyzed based on socio-semantic model. The results indicated that Trumps’ speech enjoyed a 50 percent degree of mystification, illustrating he was almost explicit in his beliefs. By reinstating the expressions such as ‘Iran’, ‘Iranian Regime’, and ‘This Regime’ as the subject of the sentences or as Halliday (1995) named, the theme of the sentences, he intently highlighted the role of Iran and its involvement in all the instability and disorder in the ‘Persian Gulf’ or as he said ‘Arabian Gulf’ area. Trump made an attempt to illuminate ‘Iranophobia’ and shed more light on its sinister and chaotic actions. By putting the blame on the previous administration, and giving so many examples with respects to Iran’s destructive actions, he tried to warn the whole world of the likely evil consequences of the contract. By studying and focusing on the linguistic features of the speech, this study endeavored to demonstrate how linguistic structures are controlled by socio-semantic features and how these features, in turn, are controlled by ideology. Ideology, in turn, is also dominated by power relations in a wider scale.