Pragmatic Analysis of Opening-Closing Arguments at Trump’s Impeachment Trial

Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States, was impeached on the eighteenth of December in 2019, when the House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment by which Trump was accused of power abuse and obstruction of Congress. Trump’s impeachment trial was managed by the Democrats who presented the case before the Senate. Adam Schiff, the Head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, led a team of Democrats who laid out the charges detailing how Trump had abused his power. This paper presents a pragmatic analysis of Adam Schiff’s opening and closing arguments at Trump’s impeachment trial, particularly in relation to deixis and vagueness. Our analytical framework includes Levinson’s classifications of person, time, and place deixis, along with those of Huang (2004), Fromkin et al. (2003) and Yule (1996). It also uses two models of vague category markers presented by Evinson, McCarthy, and O’Keeffe (2007) and Sabet and Zhang (2015). The results show that Schiff, in both arguments, employed deictic expressions as a pragmatic device serving the purpose of preciseness and presented vague category markers in a limited way. However, although Schiff’s opening argument depended on addressing reason and using deixis to offer specific facts, it was characterized by repetitive language. His closing argument, on the other hand, appealed to people’s sentiments via the use of deixis followed by emotional descriptions. It is likely that Schiff’s arguments were, to some extent, weakened by his repetitive and exaggerated language, which may have helped Trump’s case.