Negation and Its Ideological Implications in Inaugural Addresses

The study of ideology in literary and political texts is the concern of any critical study including critical stylistics. The current paper deals with the ideological positioning of Joe Biden’s and Bill Clinton’s inaugural addresses. The researchers adopt one toolkit called negation with its various categories of Critical Stylistics, as suggested by Jeffries (2010) in order to uncover the ideologies that are hidden in the presidents’ inaugural addresses. To explore the ideology in each category of negation, qualitative and quantitative approaches are adopted. The findings reveal that negating steers the text in an effective way, especially in the syntactic category. What is more, since these are inaugural addresses, most of the ideologies are positive such as unity, democracy, and indiscrimination.