Ideational grammatical metaphor and transitivity in Trump’s speeches: A Hallidayan perspective

Abstract

This research investigates the application of ideational grammatical metaphor (IGM) and transitivity patterns within Trump’s speeches, addresses, and interviews, spanning from his 2025 inaugural address to June 2025, utilizing Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework. This study inspects how Trump employs grammatical metaphor (GM), specifically nominalization, and manipulates transitivity processes to shape political narratives, establish authority and power dynamics, obscure agency, and communicate ideological stances. The analysis reveals that Trump’s communication style is marked by a prevalence of material processes, highlighting action and agency, a strategic use of GM to reify abstract concepts, and consistent transitivity patterns that support his political objectives. Through a descriptive-analytical examination of a 95,609‑word corpus comprising nine speech contexts, the study combines frequency‑based analysis with detailed clause‑level interpretation. It shows that Trump systematically deploys material processes to construe himself and his administration as highly agentive actors, relational processes to fix identities and values as seemingly factual, and nominalization to reify complex political processes into abstract entities that can be claimed, restored, or defended. Taken together, these patterns constitute an “agentic leadership discourse” in which grammatical choices redistribute agency between Trump, allies, and opponents and stabilize a particular worldview. The study extends earlier SFL‑based analyses of Trump by focusing on his second term, integrating ideational grammatical metaphor with transitivity, and comparing multiple genres (formal addresses, interviews, and press conferences) within a single presidency