| In recent years,Trump’s use of Twitter has always been a hot topic in the academic field.However,most of the previous studies mainly focus on how Trump took advantage of Twitter to win the presidential election in 2006 or how he used Twitter to run the country.There are few studies putting their emphasis on how Trump used Twitter to reconstruct his political online identities and then legitimize after he took office.Based on three types of data proposed by Hyland(2011),van Leeuwen’s(2008)legitimation strategies,and Reyes’(2011)legitimation strategies,this study makes a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the tweets posted by Trump during his first six months in office from the perspective of discursive analysis,mainly discussing three questions: What kinds of semiotic resources are adopted by Trump to construct his political online identities on Twitter? What kinds of political online identities are constructed by Trump on Twitter? How does Trump legitimize his political online identities to improve his political reputation?Major findings of this study are listed below:First,Trump constructs his political online identities with three kinds of semiotic resources,which are textual content,visual media and hyperlinks.Here visual media mainly refers to pictures and videos,hyperlink refers to hashtag.And in the process of identity construction,visual media provides persuasive evidences for the textual content,and hashtag plays an important role in expanding the influence of his tweets.Second,Trump constructs three aspects of his political online identity.He frequently attacks the mainstream media or his opponents to position himself as a real,active,and credible politician.Through promoting his governing idea and his efforts to the development of America,he positons himself as the defender of American interests.And he also strives to present himself as the promotor of the development of America by showing his political achievements and his ruling abilities.Third,the ultimate goal of shaping online identities is to legitimize his political identities.And legitimation strategies are frequently used in his tweets related to controversial issues,such as immigration issue.According to the content analysis of the corpus,five legitimation strategies used by Trump to achieve legitimation are founded in the corpus,which are authorization,moralization,rationalization,a hypothetical future,and altruism.Based on various semiotic resources,this study explores the construction of political online identities,which enriches the research of identity construction in the field of multimodal discourse analysis and is helpful to reveal the fact of shaping political online identities in the post-truth era.In addition,based on van Leeuwen’s(2008)legitimation strategies and Reyes’(2011)legitimation strategies,a new framework is created for analysis,which can be applied to specific political discourse analysis. |
PDF Full Text Request