A comparative study on stance and engagement presented by Trump and Biden in the final 2020 US presidential debate

Abstract

 Presidential debates play a significant role in the U.S. presidential election. Presidential debates are carried out in the form of intense face-to-face interaction during which candidates constantly show their positions and engage the audience. Many studies on presidential debates investigated only one or two primary stance or engagement linguistic devices (e.g., booster, second-person pronoun). Few researchers conducted a holistic and systematic investigation on a wide range of candidates’ stance and engagement features. There are also few studies specifically contrasting Trump’s and Biden’s strategic use of language in the same presidential debate. This study focused on the final 2020 U.S. presidential debate, which was the most recent and high-stake one in the U.S. but has not been investigated by many researchers yet. Adopting Hyland’s (2005b) metadiscoursal stance and engagement model as the theoretical framework, this study has thoroughly examined Trump’s and Biden’s stance and engagement presented in this debate. A combination of quantitative and qualitative analytical approach was used in this study. Findings show that both candidates employed a high frequency of stance and engagement markers. They also used different combinations of stance and engagement devices to construct different voices and strategies. For example, Trump used self-mention the exclusive “we” in combination with intensity boosters (e.g., “very”) and attitude markers (e.g., “incredible”) to emphasize team performance and achievements, while Biden used engagement markers the inclusive “we” combined with certainty boosters (e.g., “make sure”) to foreground his future commitments for American people. The findings indicate that a strategic combination of different interactional metadiscoursal devices is a powerful tool to construct voices and formulate strategies in political discourse.