A COGNITIVE-PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF TRUMP’S POLITICAL TWEETS
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46827/ejals.v4i1.305Keywords:
cognitive-pragmatic analysis, political tweetsAbstract
This study is concerned with the analysis of irony in Trump’s political tweets. Irony as a cognitive-pragmatic concept represents the discrepancy between more than one level of meaning which is conceptualized through the mapping between the source and the target levels. A model which mixes cognitive and pragmatic treatment to irony has been developed in this study and has been used to analyze Trump’s political tweets. The analysis of representative tweets for Trump has revealed certain conclusions which are relevant to politics. The most significant finding is that irony is an important strategy used in politics as it is significantly related to different levels of language such as congruity and discrepancy whose implications are only accessed through the mapping between the source and target domains of meaning.References
Attardo, S. (2000a). Irony markers and functions: Towards a goal-oriented theory of irony and its processing. Rask, 12(1), 3-20.
Bartsch, R. (2007). Dynamic Conceptual Semantics. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Colston, H. L. & Gibbs, R. W. (2002): Are irony and metaphor understood differently? Metaphor and Symbol 17, 57-80.
Coulson, S. (2005). Sarcasm and the space structuring model. In: Coulson, S. & Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (eds.): The Literal and the Nonliteral in Language and Thought. Berlin: Peter Lang, 129-144.
Eviatar, Z. & Just, M. (2006). Brain correlates of discourse processing: An fMRI investigation of irony and metaphor processing. Neuropsychologia 44.12, 2348-2359.
Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (1994). Conceptual projection and middle spaces. San Diego: UCSD Cognitive Science Technical Report 9401.
Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (1998). Conceptual integration networks. Cognitive Science 22.2, 133-187.
Fauconnier, G. & Turner, M. (2002). The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books.
Gallup News (2017). Presidential approval ratings - Donald Trump [Online].
Gibbs, R. (2008). Introspection and Cognitive Linguistics: Should We Trust Intuition?. Annual Review of Cognitive Linguistics, pp. 135 – 152.
Giora, R. (1995). On Irony and Negation. Discourse Processes, pp. 239 – 264.
Grady, J., Oakley, T. & Coulson, S. (1999). Conceptual blending and metaphor. In: Gibbs, R. (Ed.): Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 420 440.
Gumperz, J. J. (1992). Contextualization revisited. In P. Auer and A. di Luzio (Eds.), The contextualization of language (pp. 39-53). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Horn, L. and G. Ward (2006). The Handbook of Pragmatics. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Jubair, B. and Al-Hindawi, F. (2016). A Pragmatic Study of Irony in Electoral Speeches: An Effective Model of Analysis. Lambert Publishing.
Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kreuz, R. J. & Glucksberg, S. (1989). How to be sarcastic: The echoic reminder theory of verbal irony. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 118, 374-386.
Lakoff, G. (1990). The Invariance Hypothesis: Is abstract reason based on images schemas? Cognitive Linguistics 1.1, 39-74.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL (USA): University of Chicago Press.
McQuarrie, E. F., & Mick, D. G. (1996). Figures of rhetoric in advertising language. Journal of Consumer Research, 22(4), 424-438. doi: 10.1086/209459
McWhorter, J. (2017, September 15). Language Expert: Donald Trump's Way of Speaking Is 'Oddly Adolescent'. Interview by B. Williams. The 11th Hour with Brian Williams. [Television broadcast]. New York: MSNBC. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phsU1vVHOQI
Pálinkás, I. (2014): Blending and folk theory in an explanation of irony. Review of Cognitive Linguistics 12.1, 64-98. Retrieved from: http://news.gallup.com/poll/203198/presidential-approval-ratings-donaldtrump.
Retrieved from: https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/881281755017355264
Reyes, A., P. Rosso, and D. Buscaldi (2006). From Humour Recognition to Irony Detection: The Figurative Language of Social Media. Data and Knowledge Engineering, pp. 1 – 12.
Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (2007). Irony and the Resemblance- Mention. In Cole, P. (ed.). Radical Pragmatics, pp. 295 - 318. New York: Academic Press.
Trump, D. (2017) Tweet. [Online].
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).


