Interpersonal Function Analysis Of Trump’s Twitter In Different Periods

Since Trump won the 2016 U.S.presidential election,research on his Twitter discourse has increased rapidly.Twitter is his primary social networking platform for providing information and promoting his political views.He is known as the president who “tweets to govern”.Most studies have examined some of Trump’s tweets during and after his election campaign in terms of sentiment analysis and discursive strategies.In fact,Trump has been posting his political opinions on Twitter since he signed up in 2009 to lay a mass foundation for his participation in the presidential election later.Few studies focus on the tweets of his citizen period or make a comparative analysis of tweets in different identity periods from the perspective of interpersonal function.Therefore,this paper takes Halliday’s interpersonal function theory as the basic framework and selects all the tweets Trump has posted from 2009 when he signed up to the end of his presidency in 2020 as the research corpus.They are divided into three periods according to different identities: citizen,candidate,and president.Then a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods is adopted to explore the means of realizing the interpersonal function of Trump’s tweets in different periods.It is found that the three major systems of mood,modality,and personal pronouns are effective means to achieve the interpersonal functions in Trump’s tweets.In the mood system,declarative mood is used most frequently in all periods,followed by imperative and interrogative mood.By using declaratives,Trump proclaims his opinions and intentions.In the modality system,the median modal operator “will” is used most frequently,and it has the highest proportion during the candidate period,expressing Trump’s determination and commitment to win public support and votes.In the personal pronoun system,the first personal pronouns “I” and “we” are used frequently,which can not only emphasize Trump’s status and authority but also bring him closer to the public.The second personal pronoun“you” is used to attract readers’ attention and create interactions.In sum,with the skillful manipulation of the three systems,Trump successfully achieves the interpersonal function and communicative purpose in his tweets.