Abstract
Throughout the 2016 campaign, presidential candidate Donald Trump surprised observers with his ability to maintain his popularity in the face of unorthodox and often offensive statements. Trump likely bolstered his electoral chances by appealing to a large segment of voters with whom other candidates failed to align themselves. To quote one news anchor, “People tried to attack Trump; it just didn’t work - voters liked him anyway”. As previous work by Miller (2002; 2004) has shown, systemic functional linguistic (SFL) analysis (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) can illuminate particular strategies politicians employ to strengthen their arguments and exhort their audiences to join their efforts. In this paper, we employ the SFL-based Engagement framework (White, 2003; Martin & White, 2005) to examine ways in which the 2016 presidential candidates aligned themselves with their audiences. Our analysis of the speeches of Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders reveals markedly different patterns of interaction with the voters in terms of ways expansive and contractive dialogic strategies are used, an intended audience is identified and thematized, and shared assumptions are made. While Trump makes his arguments in a highly constrained dialogic space, taking the agreement with the audience for granted, his opponents often employ a mix of contractive and expansive argumentative strategies and make more explicit overtures to the audiences whose perspectives they share. This study offers insights as to how each candidate identifies and addresses his or her ideological sympathizers or opponents and exhorts the former to intensify their support.
Highlights
Donald Trump’s electoral victory has already sparked much soul-searching on a wide array of topics, from the empirical and the ideological to the rhetorical
After he had announced his candidacy, that Trump’s support would collapse during the primary season (Silver, 2015) for reasons that seemed logical at the time: He was the first major party nominee since 1952 to have had no previous political experience; he won the nomination despite well-documented apostasies on core Republican issues (Bierman, 2016); and his bare-bones organization eschewed the data analysis and voter contact apparatus of a typical campaign (Parker & Haberman, 2016)
Trump relied on bare assertions approximately as often as Clinton or Sanders, with monoglossic statements accounting for 54.28% of his total propositions. (For comparison 55% of Clinton’s utterances were monoglossic, as were 52.83% of Sanders’s.) Two percent of Trump’s monoglossic statements included examples of presupposition, as did 1% of Clinton’s monoglossic statements and 3% of Sanders’s
Summary
Donald Trump’s electoral victory has already sparked much soul-searching on a wide array of topics, from the empirical (the reliability of political forecasting) and the ideological (the disconnect between parties’ platforms and the beliefs of their core supporters) to the rhetorical (the relevance of debates and advertisements). After he had announced his candidacy, that Trump’s support would collapse during the primary season (Silver, 2015) for reasons that seemed logical at the time: He was the first major party nominee since 1952 to have had no previous political experience; he won the nomination despite well-documented apostasies on core Republican issues (Bierman, 2016); and his bare-bones organization eschewed the data analysis and voter contact apparatus of a typical campaign (Parker & Haberman, 2016) His narrow victory throws the relevance of these points into question and demands a wide-ranging effort to understand his appeal. Throughout the primary and the general election, both pundits and politicians underestimated Trump’s ability to drum up support through these atypical political speeches
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