DISCOURSE MARKERS IN PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE BETWEEN DONALD JOHN TRUMP AND HILLARY CLINTON

The objectives of the study are: (1) to find the types of discourse markers used in the presidential debate between Donald John Trump and Hillary Clinton. (2) to find the function of discourse markers in the debate (3) to elaborate the reasons of occurrence of discourse markers used in the Debate. This study is descriptive qualitative based. The data were taken from the discourse markers utterances produced by both Donald John Trump and Hillary Clinton in presidential debate that took place in September 26th, 2016 in New York which was divided into three topics, namely: Achieving prosperity, America’s direction and securing America. The data were collected by downloading the full debate from www.youtobe.com, watching and listening to the debate, transcribing the utterances produced in the debate, rewriting the transcription to become series of paragraphs and printing out all complete paragraphs as the data. Then they were analyzed by identifying the types, finding the function and analyzing the reasons of discourse markers use. The findings reveal that the four types of discourse markers namely: Interpersonal category, Referential category, Structural category and Cognitive category were found. In terms of the type, the proportion of Discourse markers were identified as the following proportion: the highest percentage of Discourse marker was Referential Category (56.60%), the second was Structural category (22.07% ), the third was Interpersonal Category (19.48 %) and Cognitive Category was the lowest percentage (1.85%). There were three functions of discourse markers namely: Subjective function, interpersonal (interactional) function and textual function. They were realized by the different various conditions occurred. The reasons of discourse markers in presidential debate caused the situation context referred to the environment created the relationship between the speaker and listener. It was realized by words used as crucial to fulfill meaning of words. It was proved by having participant engaged through configuration of process field, tenor and mode.