The Analysis of American Dream on Joe Biden's Victory Speech in USA Presidential Election 2020: Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Political speech is one of the discursive fields that maintained power using language. The main goal of the study is to investigate how American Dream is manifested in the victory speech of Joe Biden. The data are 129 sentences in the speech that collected through the transcript. The data were examined for keywords related to the addressor, the addressee, and the political speech itself. Van Dijk’s CDA is applied to analyse the speech and the background reason. The finding reveals that the pronouns mostly aim to show the unity and the power. Then, the lexicon time, rebuild, and restorebecome the slogan of his campaign. The American Dream values found are democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity, and equality for all Americans. This strategy is applied to spread nationalism and optimism based on the social problems caused by the previous government and the impact of COVID-19 pandemic