Analysis of the Right to Equality in the US Inaugural Presidential Speeches
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.28914/Atlantis-2025-47.1.13Keywords:
political discourse, corpus, CARs, semantic-cognitive analysis, lexical-syntactic representationAbstract
US political basis relies on the fundamental rights of the Declaration of Independence (equality, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness), which stem from Enlightened ideas. The question to be answered here is how the different US presidents have understood and expressed “the right to equality” in their inaugural addresses, where they present their thoughts and objectives for their term of office. Our analysis model focuses on the significance of this concept analyzed with the aid of computer tools such as NVivo and Sketch Engine, and based on the cognitive semantic constructs as expressed by US presidents, identifying the categorization and the connotative associations of this right (CARs). The results of the analysis will allow the observation of what type of lexical categories (codes) these CARs are expressed through, in addition to providing the opportunity to count, describe and illustrate them. Moreover, the results will allow the development of the expression of each CAR in the corpus to be studied according to the parameters of internal variation observed: the president involved, their ideological tendency, communicative skills, socio-political profile, and historical framework.
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