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362819

A Systemic Functional Analysis of Selected American Presidential Tweets

Article

Last updated: 25 Dec 2024

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Abstract

This study carries out Systemic Functional Linguistic (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) and Critical Discourse (Fairclough, 1995; van Dijk 1993) Analyses of a corpus of tweets posted by the former American president Barack Obama, the 44th President of the United States (@POTUS44), while in office. The data is processed using a Corpus Linguistic tool called UAM CorpusTool (O'Donnell, 2008) to facilitate the process of generating quantitative results. This study focuses on how Obama, as an American president, utilizes social media tools, with focus on his presidential Twitter account. This study also aims at investigating how the president intends to maintain relations and exploit this type of discourse to exercise power over his audience (followers). Systemic Functional Grammar is utilized in this study to examine the verbal representations according to the functions each tweet performs. This framework is capable of analyzing texts in terms of: a) how relationships are maintained between the speakers and their audiences (interpersonal metafunction); b) how speakers express themselves (ideational metafunction); and c) how they organize such expressions and feelings in their texts in spoken/written form (textual metafunction). This study concludes that tweets posted by presidents, specifically Obama, tackle different topics: education, international affairs, society, healthcare, etc.

DOI

10.21608/opde.2024.362819

Keywords

Computer Mediated Discourse, Corpus linguistics, Functional grammar, Political Tweets

Authors

First Name

Yara

Last Name

Abdelsamie

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

Assistant Lecturer in the College of Language and Communication, Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport, Cairo, Egypt

Email

yarafotouh@aast.edu

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Orcid

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Volume

86

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

48739

Issue Date

2024-04-01

Receive Date

2024-06-30

Publish Date

2024-04-01

Page Start

183

Page End

200

Print ISSN

1110-2721

Online ISSN

2735-3591

Link

https://opde.journals.ekb.eg/article_362819.html

Detail API

https://opde.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=362819

Order

7

Type

Original Article

Type Code

1,140

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

CDELT Occasional Papers in the Development of English Education

Publication Link

https://opde.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

A Systemic Functional Analysis of Selected American Presidential Tweets

Details

Type

Article

Created At

25 Dec 2024