A Critical Discourse Analysis of President Biden’s Inaugural Speech

Abstract

This paper studies the ideologies embedded in President Joe Biden’s inaugural speech in 2021 and the realizations of these ideologies through the vocabulary, grammar, and structure of the speech. The speech was systematically investigated based on the dialectical-relational approach proposed by Fairclough (2001) and systemic functional grammar by Halliday (1994) towards critical discourse analysis. There are two major ideologies that President Biden has embedded in his inaugural address through the analysis of the lexical, grammatical features, and structure of the speech First, the analysis of the text suggested that the speech plainly conveyed a strong message of unity among the US citizens under the democratic administration of President Biden in the hope of addressing the current concerns that the US had been facing. Second, President Biden emphasized the ideology of liberalism, democracy and equality during his speech based on the analysis of linguistic features as he believed that the needs for freedom and social equality are vital. These findings imply that when analyzing Biden’s, or others’ political speeches, other phonological aspects like stress or intonation should also be employed to help express the desired relationship with the audience as well as the speaker's authority and credibility towards the citizens.