Linguistic Features of Donald Trump’s Political Discourse: Focusing on Genre Differences and Change over Time

Abstract

US President Donald Trump’s language has been characterized by easy and repeated words, short sentences, and incohesive content. However, some studies have suggested that his language does not always show those linguistic features. This study addressed this unresolved issue by analyzing Trump’s language use by genre (interviews vs. presidential speeches) from various linguistic dimensions, before and during his presidency. Results showed that while his interviews were generally simple in terms of both lexicon and syntax, his presidential speeches showed similar degrees of lexical and syntactic complexity with his three predecessors. Furthermore, his speeches have tended to become more lexically and syntactically complicated since his election. In terms of text cohesion, his interviews showed higher cohesion than those of his three predecessors, although text cohesion of his speeches was similar with them. These results contest the existing assessment that Trump’s language is linguistically simple and incohesive, suggesting that the characteristics of his political discourse should be redefined by genre in terms of language complexity and text cohesion.