A Contrastive Study Of Lexical Cohesion Patterns In Donald Trump's And Hillary Clinton's Political Language

This study analyses 18 texts,spoken by the candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton,contenders for the American presidency in the 2016 race,with the aim of establishing whether there were any differences in their lexicon use,particularly with respect to cohesion and coherence,which may have contributed to Trump's victory.The texts are chosen from the primary debates,presidential debates and a number of interviews,i.e.chosen on different points on the time line before the election.Theories considering lexical cohesion have aroused public attention ever since they were first invented,among which the one proposed by Michael Hoey(1991)is very much appreciated for the objective analysis model it adopts.So following Hoey's lexical cohesion theory,this thesis is about to divide the lexis into six categories: simple lexical repetition,complex lexical repetition,simple paraphrase,complex paraphrase,hyponymic repetition and co-reference.By establishing matrices and nets,the central and marginal sentences of the texts are recognized.By calculating the frequency of the lexical patterns with the help of independent samples tests,the study shows two significant differences between the two corpora: in Trump's texts simple lexical repetition(suggesting cohesion)and marginal sentences(suggesting incoherence)predominate.The study finally points out that although Trump produced many more marginal sentences than Clinton,he did not differ significantly from Clinton in the use of central sentences,which together with Trump's preference for simple repetition may have contributed to his election victory.