Il concetto di "presidentialness" nell'era di Trump: un'analisi corpus-assisted

The aim of my dissertation is to study the language used by the current President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, by applying a corpus-assisted approach. Over the last two years, the President has become a permanent fixture in the news. The media have analyzed not only his political agenda, but also his appearance and his language. Oftentimes, neither has been judged “presidential enough”, although there are no established criteria to identify “presidentialness”. In the first two chapters, I provide a theoretical background to the main arguments of the dissertation. The first chapter focuses on the meaning of political discourse analysis and corpus-assisted discourse analysis. The second chapter then contextualizes the speaker (President Trump) and his relationship with the media. In the third chapter, I explain how the two corpora (containing speeches produced by Donald Trump during rallies or during presidential events) were built; I will subsequently conduct an analysis of the said corpora to identify certain linguistic traits of the President’s language. These expressions will serve as a starting point for my observations. I finally sum up my findings and attempt to evaluate the “presidentialness” observable in the President’s language, with respect to the typical features observed in the candidate’s language. In the conclusion I also suggest topics for further analysis. These include the building of additional corpora formed of transcriptions of other candidates’ speeches, that could be used to rule out linguistic phenomena that could have been erroneously ascribed to President Trump, but are really typical of the genre of institutional speeches at large.