Legitimation Strategies in Trump’s Venezuela Post-Operation Address Through Illocutionary Speech Acts Analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33394/jollt.v14i4.19344Keywords:
Illocutionary speech acts, Legitimacy, Political discourse, PragmaticsAbstract
This study examines how political legitimacy is constructed through illocutionary speech acts in President Donald Trump’s address following the U.S. military operation against Venezuela. Employing a qualitative descriptive approach with a single-case study design, the study analyzes a 58-minute-and-41-second presidential address comprising 295 clauses. The analysis integrates Searle’s (1979) classification of illocutionary speech acts and van Leeuwen’s (2007) framework of legitimation strategies. The findings reveal that assertive speech acts dominate (69.8%), followed by expressive (14.2%), commissive (12.5%), directive (2.4%), and declarative (1.0%) acts. Assertive acts primarily construct the official narrative of the operation by presenting claims about military achievements, security threats, and operational effectiveness as factual accounts. These utterances contribute to rationalization by portraying military intervention as necessary, successful, and strategically justified. Authorization is established through references to presidential and institutional authority, while moral evaluation emerges through negative representations of opponents and positive portrayals of American actions. Mythopoesis appears less prominently, mainly through warnings emphasizing the consequences of resistance. Commissive acts further reinforce legitimacy by projecting commitments to national security and political stability. The findings demonstrate that political legitimacy is discursively constructed through the interaction of different illocutionary functions and legitimation strategies. This study contributes to political pragmatics by explaining how micro-level speech acts support broader strategies of political legitimation in presidential discourse concerning military intervention.
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