Matteo Salvini auf Twitter: eine Analyse ausgewählter sprachlicher, stilistischer und rhetorischer Strategien

Abstract

The present article intends to identify some of Matteo Salvini’s rhetoric strategies on the platform Twitter. The corpus consists of more than 1800 tweets, posted during three key months of his political activity in 2018: the last month of the political campaign for the general elections on March 4th; the first month of Giuseppe Conte’s cabinet with Salvini as Minister of the Interior and Deputy Prime Minister; the sixth month of the cabinet, representing a first evaluation of his work in Parliament. The analysis focuses first on Salvini’s use of Twitter’s typical contextualization tools (hashtag, mention and retweet), revealing a preference for hashtags. These are used mostly to create powerful slogans (#primagliitaliani, #dalleparoleaifatti, #chiudiamoiporti etc.) and to quote himself in short tweets (#Salvini is the most common hashtag in the entire corpus). The second part of the article looks at some aspects of Salvini’s language, which includes the use of an informal lexis with traits that are typical for the orality, excluding structures (noi/loro), a simple often paratactic syntax, a strategic use of repetitions (anaphora, accumulatio) and useful typographical means (uppercase letters, punctuation) that underline the emotions of a «ministro normale che fa cose normali» (Matteo Salvini in a tweet from 21st December 2018).