The power of stance: Linguistic strategies in Donald Trump’s election campaign

There is no capitalist conspiracy and the rich are not all‐powerful

Donald Trump's nomination posed a challenge for Republican congressional candidates running on the ticket with him in 2016. The nominee's intense base of support within the party combined with his unprecedented unpopularity more broadly required these candidates to think strategically about supporting or opposing him. This article examines how they responded to that challenge, what explains their different responses, and what electoral consequences ensued from their choices. The data show that candidates' positions on Trump primarily reflected the partisanship of their districts and secondarily their gender and incumbency status. Their strategic choices had little general impact in an election almost completely dominated by partisanship, but in at least a few instances refusal to support Trump may have been necessary for the Republican incumbent to win reelection.

Evaluating the use of stance markers is an important approach to investigate the interactional and persuasive nature of academic writing in English. However, the problems EFL learners’ face using of stance markers and its research methodologies in crosslinguistic analysis are uncertain. This systematic literature review examined problems EFL learners’ face in using of stance markers and the research methodologies used to identify these problems in crosslinguistic research. The current study employed the PRISMA 2020 paradigm to conduct a systematic literature review (SLR) of crosslinguistic analysis of stance markers in EFL learners’ academic writing in English. Keywords queries on “stance*”, “academic writing*”, “metadiscourse*” and “metadiscursive*” were used to retrieve articles from Scopus and Web of Science databases. Following screening, 34 articles were included in the final analysis. EFL learners had problems in using hedges, boosters, self-mentions and attitude markers, and their main challenges were in the overuse of boosters and underuse of hedges. Chinese EFL learners had the most problems in using stance markers. All the 34 articles adopted an empirical approach and most were a corpus-based study. Researchers were fond of argumentative essays, dissertations, and research articles from coursework. In addition, scholars preferred one-way comparisons especially between native language and interlanguage (NL vs IL). Enhancing EFL learners' awareness of stance markers would require more instructions regarding stance markers in academic writing classrooms and future research should use three-way or four-way comparisons in crosslinguistic analysis.

This chapter investigates the extent of similarity in the use of stance markers in two national varieties of West African English, Nigerian English and Ghanaian English, and compares them to British English. The frequency and stylistic variability of four semantic groups of stance markers were examined in ICE-Nigeria and ICE-Ghana and compared with ICE-Great Britain. The results are mixed: the two West African varieties show an overall lower frequency of stance markers compared to British English but the speakers of the two West African English varieties do not demonstrate lower stylistic variability in the use of stance markers across different text types. Notwithstanding, there are systematic differences in stance marker usage between the two West African English varieties.

The main aim of this study is to describe the linguistic and discursive strategies of speaker-hearer alignment used by Donald Trump in his tweets about ‘fake news’. As previous work by Miller (2002; 2004) and Quam and Ryshina-Pankova (2016) has shown, Engagement theory (Martin and White 2005) can shed light on particular strategies politicians employ to strengthen their arguments and persuade their audiences to adopt their views. Starting from the assumption that Donald Trump’s use of Twitter played in his favour already in the 2016 Presidential campaign, the present analysis shows that Donald Trump tends to privilege meaning-making choices which ‘fend off’ or ‘shut down’ dialogistic alternatives: typically, his tweets contain either ‘bare assertions’ which take shared assumptions for granted, or ‘contractive heteroglossic’ options that make the dialogic space very constrained. In general, the ‘Engagement moves’ deployed are quite limited and repetitive, consisting mainly of ‘Denials’, ‘Pronouncements’, and ‘Counters’: this might work to Donald Trump’s advantage, as repetitions can give the speaker an air of authority and provoke an unconscious response of support among his followers (Lakoff 2016). This study also shows that the distribution of linguistic and discursive strategies in Donald Trump’s tweets is very similar to the distribution of the same resources in non-Twitter contexts: therefore, his ‘Engagement style’ in Twitter does not seem to be due to the character-limit of the platform, but to a more general ‘cross-media’ tendency that tends to tune down alternative positions.

With election programs and election campaign speeches, this article deals with two types of communication that cannot be viewed in isolation, but only in the context of the communication area of election campaigns. First of all, election campaign communication is embedded in the communication area of politics with its specific characteristics and fields of action and described in its text-type-specific and linguistic- stylistic properties. On the basis of a multi-level model, which covers the situational, functional, thematic and linguistic-stylistic levels, a text type characterization of the election program and election speech follows. It is shown that the election program represents a central interface within an election campaign and that the election campaign speech, as a classic type of election campaign, effectively contributes to emotionalizing and mobilizing the supporters.

The past few decades have witnessed the hot discussion concerning language and gender from various aspects, with the use of stance markers as one of the most vital angles. To find out the gender similarities and differences in the use of stance markers under the classification by Hyland, figure out the gender features and summarize the behind reasons, this article combines the qualitative and quantitative analysis together, conducts a detailed analysis on twenty TED speeches delivered by ten male and ten female lecturers, respectively. Finally, the study finds that firstly, there are no distinctive differences in the use of stance markers in the primary class proposed by Hyland named hedges, boosters, attitude markers and self-mention. But the female lecturers use stance makers more frequently on the whole. Secondly, in terms of secondary class which complemented by other scholars, still no obvious differences are found in terms of hedges and attitude markers. Then, for the use of boosters, the males prefer fact-asserting while the females tend to use certainty-indicating. As for the employment of self-mention markers, words indicating authority such as I are more frequently used by males and those contributing to solidarity between the speaker and audience such as we are more commonly applied by females. The discovery of gender similarities and differences involves various reasons, and it provides important implications for the study of oral English.

Stance in academic discourse refers to the writer-oriented approach to interact with readers by commenting on the credibility of propositions, expressing their own attitudes or mentioning themselves. This study compares and analyzes the overall distribution and differences of the use of stance markers in Chinese and international journal abstracts. The corpus includes 200 journal abstracts from the both top 10 Chinese and international academic journals of aerospace discipline from 2018 to 2022. The results show that Chinese and international journal abstracts frequently use stance markers to express author’s attitudes and the following pattern appears in both journals according to the frequency of use, that is, epistemic stance markers> attitude markers > self-mention. Meanwhile, Chinese and international journals differ significantly in the use of approximators, shields, affect markers, first person self-mention and third person self-mention. International journals also seem to adopt more hedges than boosters, while Chinese journals adopt more boosters than hedges. A comparative analysis of stance markers could provide some reference for Chinese authors in writing academic abstracts.

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the strategies employed by six Arabic news channels in translating the controversial comments that Donald Trump made during his election campaign (2015–2016) and his first three years in office (2017–2019). Drawing on politeness theory, we look at the ways in which translators negotiate the offensive and inappropriate nature of comments made by Donald Trump that could threaten the positive face of Arab audiences. However, protecting the face of their target audience is not the only concern Arab translators consider when dealing with Donald Trump speech. Translators might also intervene to protect their own face because, in reproducing Donald Trump’s offensive comments, they might also be considered responsible for the use of face-threatening language acts. Additionally, we argue that translators are aware of Donald Trump’s discursive ethos which is central to his rise to power. Mitigating the offensive and inappropriate content of Donald Trump’s comments might alter his public image in the eyes of Arab viewers. We argue that translating Donald Trump’s ethos as an abrasive speaker who uses insults as a rhetorical weapon outweighs the need to protect the positive face of Arab audiences.

This paper examines the strategies employed by six Arabic news channels in translating the controversial comments that Donald Trump made during his election campaign (2015–2016) and his first three years in office (2017–2019). Drawing on politeness theory, we look at the ways in which translators negotiate the offensive and inappropriate nature of comments made by Donald Trump that could threaten the positive face of Arab audiences. However, protecting the face of their target audience is not the only concern Arab translators consider when dealing with Donald Trump speech. Translators might also intervene to protect their own face because, in reproducing Donald Trump’s offensive comments, they might also be considered responsible for the use of face-threatening language acts. Additionally, we argue that translators are aware of Donald Trump’s discursive ethos which is central to his rise to power. Mitigating the offensive and inappropriate content of Donald Trump’s comments might alter his public image in the eyes of Arab viewers. We argue that translating Donald Trump’s ethos as an abrasive speaker who uses insults as a rhetorical weapon outweighs the need to protect the positive face of Arab audiences.

This chapter explores the impact of presidential primary campaigns on House and Senate primary races, looking at the relationship between presidential and nonpresidential primaries, and evaluating the effect Donald Trump had on candidate emergence and strategy. Few candidates wished to associate themselves with Trump, yet the Republican presidential primary so dominated media and public attention that Republican primary candidates who might have flourished in any other year, such as conservative, Tea Party–style candidates, were unable to garner attention or raise as much money as they might otherwise have. Moreover, even in the handful of primary races featuring so-called “mini-Trumps,” there were few in which attention to gender issues or misogynist rhetoric played a role. The chapter documents these findings by comparing 2016 to prior election years with regard to primary competition, turnout, and spending, and examining congressional primaries in which Republican candidates were overtly compared to or endorsed Donald Trump.

Argumentation schemes, fallacies, and evidence in politicians’ argumentative tweets—A coded dataset

Between early March and 1 August 2020, COVID-19 took the lives of more than 150,000 Americans. Here, we examine the political consequences of the COVID-19 epidemic using granular data on COVID-19 fatalities and the attitudes of the American public. We find that COVID-19 has led to substantial damage for President Trump and other Republican candidates. States and local areas with higher levels of COVID-19 fatalities are less likely to support President Trump and Republican candidates for House and Senate. Our results show that President Trump and other Republican candidates would benefit electorally from a reduction in COVID-19 fatalities. This implies that a greater emphasis on social distancing, masks, and other mitigation strategies would benefit the president and his allies.

The recent Republican win of Donald Trump, as the new President of the US, has raised several questions about what shape the Pak-US relations will take under the Trump administration. Analysts, policy makers and the general public have been sceptical about the new Republican nominee’s stance towards Pakistan, as has been evident from his previous statements. Also, since the US policy has not been a balanced one in recent years, owing to the situation in the region, it is pertinent to note that in recent times, the US has also been largely tilted towards Pakistan’s arch rival ─ India. Moreover, the decisive factors, likely to influence relations between the two countries, are the rise of China and the security situation in Afghanistan through which a not so pro-Pakistan, the Republican presidency will view the country and adjust its strategic interests to this part of the world. Counterterrorism operations are likely to be under constant review, as well as aid to Pakistan. The “do more” phenomenon is expected to reverberate with more enthusiasm from a Republican Congress backed by a Republican president. The most likely implication for Pakistan can be of extreme disengagement in case the Trump presidency decides to isolate the country, but a total cut off is not likely due to Pakistan’s strategic location. This paper attempts to discuss what could be the possible implications for Pakistan while keeping in view that the Trump administration has assumed power recently. The Trump administration has largely been silent on its Pakistan policy, with the exception of a few statements.

Understanding how pre-service English teachers adopt stance toward academic teaching inquiry tasks