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2020 - Volume 3 - Number 2

Coronavirus Outbreak in Mexico: A Critical Discourse Analysis of AMLO’s Speech

Diana Francisco-Ortega * dian.fcoo@gmail.com * ORCID: 0000-0002-0827-6023
University of Guanajuato, Division of Social Sciences and Humanities, MEXICO

Open Journal for Studies in Linguistics, 2020, 3(2), 93-100 * https://doi.org/10.32591/coas.ojsl.0302.05093f
Received: 11 June 2020 ▪ Accepted: 30 October 2020 ▪ Published Online: 9 December 2020

LICENCE: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

ARTICLE (Full Text - PDF)

ABSTRACT:
A recent pandemic called coronavirus (Covid-19) has been spreading rapidly around the world this year, 2020. While some countries have confirmed cases and deaths, others as Mexico start to see far approaches of what is likely to be a large coronavirus outbreak. A video posted in YouTube by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, known by his nickname AMLO, portrayed his opinion regarding the coronavirus and the security measure. This paper, based on Critical Discourse Analysis theory and Systematic Functional Linguistics, explore AMLO’s speech by analyzing focused on transitivity and modality to discover what is behind the Mexican president’s speech and its social consequences. The findings suggest that AMLO’s speech has a different intention than convince the Mexican population that everything is fine.

KEY WORDS: coronavirus, systematic functional linguistics, transitivity, modality, opaque meaning.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR:
Diana Francisco-Ortega (MA student), University of Guanajuato, Division of Social Sciences and Humanities, Guanajuato, MEXICO. E-mail: dian.fcoo@gmail.com.

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