Donald Trump’s pragmalinguistic strategies in Twitter before and during the COVID-19 crisis: a corpus driven approach

• Autor(a) principal: Jasmins, Diogo César Henriques
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.13/3876
• topic: Twitter; Corpus driven approach; COVID-19; Pragmalinguistic strategies; Donald Trump; Abordagem orientada por corpus; Estratégias pragmalinguísticas; Linguistics: Societies and Cultures; .; Faculdade de Artes e Humanidades; Domínio/Área Científica::Humanidades::Línguas e Literaturas

COVID-19 is one of the most remarkable worldwide crises of the latest decade with 33 million cases in the US as of the 1 st of July 2021. In these difficult times citizens seem to have looked up to their leaders for guidance and support (Wood & Owens & Durham, 2005) as largely represented in the media (i.e., print press, online press and social media) whose study is nevertheless beyond the scope of full coverage and analysis in this dissertation. Rather interesting for this case study is the scrutiny of the way Donald Trump, the running President of the USA at the moment COVID-19 hit the country, interacted online and established the virtual rapport with interlocutors (Walther, 1992; Crystal, 2006; Greengard, 2009; Murthy, 2013; Baym, 2015 & Burgess & Baym, 2020) given his reported multiple ways of communicating globally with a focus on the COVID pandemic in the United States. The analysis of online Twitter corpora selected from Trump’s Twitter in two periods (5 months prior and after COVID mentions in Trump’s Twitter) makes it possible to look at the way Twitter messages were encoded, particularly evidenced in indexical expressions (i.e., personal pronoun reference) and the cooperative principle, both objects of scrutiny in this piece of research. More than the linguistic choices, or possible colligations and collocations to be associated with the lexeme COVID (via corpus linguistics and a discourse-based approach, following Baker, 2006; Biber, Conrad and Reppen ,1998; as well as corpus pragmatics, in the line of Romero-Trillo, 2017), this exploratory research study of interdisciplinary kind intends to disclose relevant pragmalinguistic strategies (Sousa & Ivanova, 2012) evidenced in tweet exchanges between a leading politician in the global scenario and internet users (Mirzaeian, 2020). This dissertation brings to the fore and discussesstrategies likely to strengthen or deepen the gap among interlocutors.