An Analysis Of Impolite Speech Acts In Donald Trump's Speeches

With the emergence of pragmatic studies of impoliteness(Beebe,1995;Culpeper,1996,2005,2010,2011 a,b;Kienpointner,1997;Tracy,2017),the research on the interpretation of impoliteness is inclined to be interdisciplinary,multi-theoretical and multi-sided.Upon the review of the relevant studies,it is found that studies of impoliteness from interdisciplinary perspective are gradually favored by scholars.However,though some scholars have highlighted the crucial role of prosody played in utterance comprehension(cf.Arndt & Richard 1987;Culpeper,2011 a,b),the research on the interplay of prosody and impolite speech acts has failed to attract scholars' attention(Culpeper,2011a).On account of the background information about impoliteness studies and the role prosody played in utterance interpretation,this thesis,based on the models proposed by Culpeper(1996)and Bousfield(2008),attempts to explore the impolite speech acts in the 45 th president of the US,Donald Trump's presidential electoral speeches,with special reference to prosodic components.The questions examined in the thesis are,specifically:(1)What are the commonly employed impoliteness strategies by Donald Trump?(2)What is the working mechanism between prosody and impolite speech acts and what are the corresponding effects?(3)Does people of different groups(people of various age,parties,language backgrounds)perceive impolite speech acts in the same way?A mixed method is designed in this thesis by combining qualitative approach with quantitative approach.The tools OSCAR(Gibbon,2017a)and Praat(Boersma & Weenink,2013)are employed to help collect and analyze the data.First,impolite utterances are extracted,classified and collected by examining the speech delivered by Donald Trump;second,typical bald-on record impolite utterances by employing strategies are sorted and analyzed;third,to better understand the function of prosody in impoliteness comprehension,a questionnaire is designed with the aid of OSCAR,containing 10 prosodically impolite utterances;and then,detailed prosodic factors of these 10 items are annotated and captured in Praat;last,the 10 prosodically impolite utterances are individually explored through the combination of 36 questionnaires and the detailed screenshots in Praat.The major findings of this thesis are as follows:(1)from the data,it is found that bald-on record impolite speech acts could be enhanced by using language skills such as repetition,rhetorical question,exaggeration,negative words and superlative words;(2)Donald Trump tends to manipulate phonetic features to convey his communicative intentions.The prosodic components such as intonation,pause and stress could convey impolite messages effectively to the target hearers,on the one hand,to enhance bald-on record impolite speech acts,on the other hand,to create off-record impolite speech acts;(3)impolite speech acts are commonly used by Donald Trump to attack the target hearers' face so as to build up his own self-image;(4)through data analysis of the collected questionnaires,party inclination and language backgrounds are found to have significant influence on people's understanding of impoliteness,while age and gender don't show much influence.Practically,the present study contributes to facilitating understanding of impolite speech acts by investigating impoliteness in view of language skills and phonetic features deployed by Donald Trump.Theoretically,the study enriches the research of impoliteness in terms of research data to some extent.In addition,the methodology used in this study provides useful implications to the interface study between impoliteness and prosody.