An Analysis of the Social Roles and Practices and Interactional Metadiscoursal Resources in American Former President Trump’s Facebook Text Messages

Abstract

Facebook is a means of interaction through which individuals most frequently relate to others. Most of the studies that have attempted to analyze Trump’s messages or speeches were descriptive. They have not critically pinpointed some of the socio-cultural motivations that have given rise to the linguistic options utilized by the writer. Therefore, the present study purports to critically analyze the experiential social roles and practices articulated by Trump's Facebook messages and the socio-cultural factors motivating these roles. It also attempts to examine the interactional meta-discoursal persuasive linguistic strategies employed to qualify these roles and practices. To this end, a corpus of two hundred posted texts was selected from Donald Trump’s personal Facebook page. We drew on Van Laween’s (2008) CDA model and Hyland’s (2005) interactional meta-discourse framework to analyze these texts. The results have provided insights about Trump’s identity and his various relationships. Trump utilized a high frequency of active material social processes to construct a positive image of himself as an active leader who shares common concerns with his audience, whereas he evaluated his opponents negatively by presenting them as always being involved in negative social processes. Besides, he utilized certain interactional cues to affect his addressees’ attitude in order to secure their positive reaction to the propositional content and to involve them collaboratively through his messages.