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List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: From Fake News to Tremendous Success, Matthias Eitelmann and Ulrike Schneider
Part I: Rhetoric & Repetition
2. It’s Just Words, Folks. It’s Just Words: Donald Trump’s Distinctive Linguistic Style, Jesse Egbert and Douglas Biber
3. I Know Words, I have the Best Words: Repetitions, Parallelisms, and Matters of (In)Coherence, Kristina Nilsson Björkenstam and Gintare Grigonyte
4. A Man who was Just an Incredible Man, an Incredible Man: Age Factors and Coherence in Donald Trump’s Spontaneous Speech, Patricia Ronan and Gerold Schneider
Part II: Evaluation & Emotion
5. Very Emotional, Totally Conservative, and Somewhat All over the Place: An Analysis of Intensifiers in Donald Trump’s Speech, Ulrike Stange
6. Crooked Hillary, Lyin’ Ted, and Failing New York Times: Nicknames in Donald Trump’s Tweets, Jukka Tyrkkö and Irina Frisk
7. I’m Doing Great with the Hispanics. Nobody Knows it: The Distancing Effect of Donald Trump’s the-Plurals, Ulrike Schneider and Kristene K. McClure
Part III: Discourse & Metaphor
8. Either we WIN this Election, or we are Going to LOSE this Country!: Trump’s WARLIKE COMPETITION Metaphor, Anthony Koth
9. Silence and Denial Trump’s Discourse on the Environment, Marta Degani and Alexander Onysko
10. Donald Trump’s “Fake News” Agenda: A Pragmatic Account of Rhetorical Delegitimization, Christoph Schubert
11. Sorry Not Sorry: Political Apology in the Age of Trump, Jan David Hauck and Teruko Vida Mitsuhara
Part IV: Conclusion
12. Great Movement vs. Crooked Opponents: Is Donald Trump’s Language Populist?, Ulrike Schneider and Matthias Eitelmann
List of Contributors
Index
About the author
Ulrike Schneider is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Mainz, Germany.Matthias Eitelmann is Assistant Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Mainz, Germany.
Summary
From an abundance of intensifiers to frequent repetition and parallelisms, Donald Trump’s idiolect is highly distinctive from that of other politicians and previous Presidents of the United States. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, this book identifies the characteristic features of Trump’s language and argues that his speech style, often sensationalized by the media, differs from the usual political rhetoric on more levels than is immediately apparent.
Chapters examine Trump’s tweets, inaugural address, political speeches, interviews, and presidential debates, revealing populist language traits that establish his idiolect as a direct reflection of changing social and political norms. The authors scrutinize Trump’s conspicuous use of nicknames, the definite article, and conceptual metaphors as strategies of othering and antagonising his opponents. They further shed light on Trump’s fake news agenda and his mutation of the conventional political apology which are strategically implemented for a political purpose.
Drawing on methods from corpus linguistics, conversation analysis, and critical discourse analysis, this book provides a multifaceted investigation of Trump’s language use and addresses essential questions about Trump as a political phenomenon.
Foreword
Combines quantitative and qualitative analyses to identify the characteristic features of Donald Trump’s language use.
Additional text
The volume offers in-depth descriptions of Trump's linguistic style and discursive strategies ... drawing on both quantitative and qualitative linguistic analyses. The results of the analyses provide nuanced insight into Trump's communicative style and campaign strategy.
