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COMMUNICATIVE STRATEGIES ON TWITTER: CASE STUDY OF DONALD TRUMP AND HILLARY CLINTON
Abstract
Political discourse of social networks (and the discourse of Twitter in particular) exhibits a number of structural and semantic features that differentiate it from other political discourses. Such factors as multimodality, interactivity, immediacy and limitation on the message length affect the communication on Twitter in terms of what communicative strategies are used and how they are implemented. This study explores the linguistic and paralinguistic means employed by US presidential candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the messages on their official Twitter accounts during one month prior to the 2016 election. The research was conducted on 215 Twitter posts by D. Trump and 116 Twitter posts by H. Clinton. Two primary communicative strategies were identified: the strategy of positive imaging of the candidate and the strategy of negative imaging of the opponent. The following communicative tactics used within these strategies were analyzed: positive self-presentation, negative presentation, manipulation, unification, separation. The tactics are realized through various language means, including certain vocabulary choices, rhetorical structures and stylistic devices. The results are discussed in terms of (a) specifics of the format of Twitter communication and its influence on the pre-election political discourse, (b) prevalence of certain communicative tactics and language means in the candidates discourse patterns, and (c) differences between the Republican and Democratic narratives.
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