Linguistic Inquiries Into Donald Trump's Language

Book excerpt: From short paratactic sentences to frequent repetition and parallelisms, Donald Trump's idiolect is highly distinctive from that of previous Presidents of the USA. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses, this book identifies the characteristic features of Trump's language and argues that his speech style, often underestimated by the media, is strategically implemented as a persuasive device. The chapters examine Trump's tweets, inaugural address, political speeches, interviews, presidential debates and reality TV appearances, revealing populist language traits that establish his idiolect as a direct reflection of changing social and political norms. Also scrutinised is Trump's deviant use of nicknames, the definite article and conceptual metaphors as strategies of othering and antagonising his opponents, which is tailored to a specific political purpose. Drawing on techniques from corpus linguistics, multimodality 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