Vol. 21, Issue 1, Jan-Jun 2026

Page: 117-130

A Socio-Pragmatic Analysis of Stance-Taking in Democratic American Speeches of Immigration

Noora Adnan Abd Aljaleel, Prof. Dr. Bushra Ni’ma Rashid

Received Date: 2026-03-18

Accepted Date: 2026-05-27

Published Date: 2026-07-01

Stance-taking, defined as the manifestation of speakers' attitudes, evaluations, emotions, and opinions, is one of the key features of political speech. Within the Democratic American immigration speech genre, stance-taking assumes paramount importance in molding public opinion and establishing the national identity of America. Biber & Finegan (1989), as developed by Du Bois (2007), have developed the concept of stance, which refers to the socio-linguistic strategy adopted by the speaker for creating alignments. The problem is that most of the existing studies have concentrated on the ideological polarization of the discourse, the use of metaphors, and discourse strategies, but the pragmatic means of stance-taking, such as hedging, boosting, modality, and evaluative expressions, have not been adequately investigated. The present paper aims at: Determining the most frequently utilized lexical strategies and socio-pragmatic resources that contribute to the construction of stance in the corpus of Democratic American immigration speeches. The paper used a framework including the stance markers by Biber and Finegan (1989), the socio-pragmatic stance markers by Hyland (1999), and finally the Appraisal Theory by Martin and White (2005). On the data side, this paper focuses strictly on Democratic American immigration speeches given by prominent politicians of the United States. The conclusion. The over-representation of the highest frequency categories in all three models (boosters: 27%, Verb + that clause: 33%, Graduation: Force: 21%) reveals a common rhetorical symmetry. The text is an elegant combination of the interactional authority, the syntactic credibility, and the moral alignment that characterize contemporary presidential discourse, which is built on a complex language convergence to systematically create and defend institutional legitimacy.

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