Trump Pragmatic Analysis

This analysis demonstrated that Trump’s discursive strategies are characterised with representative and expressive speech acts, mostly used to violate conversational implicatures which Trump created consciously. I also analysed all the types of implicatures detected in these excerpts. Besides that, other pragmatic strategies used to violate the maxims were analysed –tautology and politeness strategies. The importance of tautology cannot be denied in the pragmatic analysis of spoken discourse. Despite it being counted as a major error, speakers commonly use tautology in everyday life. Trump uses this powerful device to emphasize a particular idea, to draw their listeners’ attention, but also to violate the maxim of relevance in the process
He is successful in mitigating face threatening acts to preserve a good self-image and he uses both positive and negative face in his speeches. Whenever his “face” seems to be threatened he violates the conversational maxims to avoid diminishing a good self-image. Sometimes he uses humour to preserve a good-self image. Humour was created mainly through creating particularised conversational implicatures, but he also violates the conversational maxims (mostly the maxim of quality) to provoke laughter. Moreover, it has been detected that Trump violates the maxim of quantity through stacked non-restrictive relative clauses. The final section includes the multimodal analysis of Trump’s appearance. I detected the three function of language presented by Halliday and analysed them in term of their usage to portray how Trump manages to arouse and engage the public while using only his body posture or facial expressions. This pragmatic analysis proved that Donald Trump uses specific pragmatic strategies to accomplish his political aim. In spite of his inflammatory language and a high level of comfort with political violence, his language skills turned out to be very
The important distinction in the composition of this image is the distinction between the left side and the right side. People tend to read images in the same way the read texts, starting from the left and moving to the right (Jones: 93). Thus, the left side presents the “given” information, while the right side presents the “new” information. Trump presents the “given” information, because people already knew that he was running for the president. The text “TACK BACK OUR COUNTRY” presents the “new” information implying that Trump has the same radical ideas as the previous Republican leaders. Trump’s strong anti-immigration policy generated much publicity. Trump proposed the mass deportation of illegal immigrants who are “taking the jobs” from Americans: “They can't get jobs, because there are no jobs, because China has our jobs and Mexico has our jobs. They all have jobs.” It has been argued why this slogan evokes the idea of racism and segregation when used by the Republicans, but not when used by the Democrats. Maybe the answer to this issue lies in the fact that the slogan was mostly used by the Republicans (as well as by George Wallace) during 1960s and 1970s. Thus, the producer of the image made a parallel between the social problems in 1960s and those in 2016, while comparing Trump to George