Trump’s and Clinton’s language and gestures in the 2016 US presidential debate

• Main Authors: Yu Sun, 孫瑀
• Other Authors: Yen-Liang Lin
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9pt7g4

碩士 === 國立臺北科技大學 === 應用英文系碩士班 === 105 === Language and politics are intimately linked as rhetorical strategies can shape and strengthen a politician’s image. Spontaneous gestures aligned with speech can also reveal aspects of our cognitive process while speaking (e.g., Cienki, 2004; Kangas, 2014), but few studies have focused on such, despite abundant research in presidential debates and political discourse. To this end, this study investigates the linguistic features of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton by examining their language and gestures in 2016 US presidential election’s televised debate. This study aims to answer the following: (1) What are the different lexical and semantic features used by Trump and Clinton? (2) What are the rhetorical strategies used by Trump and Clinton? (3) To what extent do Trump and Clinton exhibit gesture preferences, and what are the functions and roles of gestures in the political debate? Applying a corpus linguistic approach, this study examines the debate transcripts using Wmatrix to generate keywords and word frequency lists, revealing each candidate’s lexical choices and semantic features. Further, utterances are analyzed qualitatively to explore rhetoric strategies and interactions. The political discourse follows Halmari’s (2008) analytical framework and focuses on rhetorical strategies such as turn-initiating, use of personal pronouns and vocatives, as well as coherence and cohesion building strategies. This study also investigates differences in gestures using Müller’s (1998) functional classification of gestures, analyzing referential gestures, performative gestures, and discursive gestures. Findings suggest that Trump prefers first-person singular pronouns and negative voice while Clinton prefers first-person plural pronouns and positive voice. For rhetoric strategies, Clinton utilizes the turn-initiator well to express disagreement or offers non-straight answers with negative connotations. Clinton’s answers are more coherent and cohesive, contrasting to Trump’s lacking thereof. Gesture analysis results suggest that Trump and Clinton employ similar gestures in negation discourse. Trump adopted more referential gestures for concrete reference, while Clinton demonstrated a higher level of lexical choices than Trump by adopting more referential gestures for abstract reference. Aside from illustrating how candidates employ rhetorical strategies and convey personal attributes via language and gestures, this study offers suggestions for further empirical research on political discourse.