Mid Sweden University

The aim of this research paper was to carry out an analysis of President Trump’s bad language on Twitter through a quantitative and a qualitative approach. The quantitative approach was conducted through a computer-based corpus linguistic study while the qualitative approach was carried out through a corpus based discourse analysis method. The quantitative approach focused on the number of swear words and other derogatory terms that were twitted by Trump between the period he launched his presidential campaign for the 2016 election to the day he launched his second-term campaign for the 2020 election. A total of 42 search term were extracted from several relevant studies to be used to identify similar words in the corpus of tweets, and the total number of swear words that were identified was 10; with hell, suck and ass with the highest frequency of use correspondingly. Derogatory terms were also extracted, and a much higher number of these were identified with fake having the highest frequency of use.

The qualitative part focused on language patterns and similarities in language use through concordance sorting and manual examination. The terms hell and fake, which made the first places on the lists of the identified swear words and derogatory terms respectively, were used as the target terms for qualitative analysis. The results showed that hell collocated mostly with names of persons and organizations. For example, in several cases Donald Trump compared Hillary Clinton and Brussels to hell while in some other cases hell collocated with questions words, indicating Trump’s frustration and surprise on some specific issues that happened within his administration but that he had no control over. However, because the number of occurrences for hell was rather low, the identified language patterns for this term were also based on few entries. This had a somewhat negative impact on the validity and reliability of the study. On the other hand, the target term fake collocated mostly with news, media and dossier. The result for fake showed that Trump used mocking nicknames extensively to the news and the new agencies that criticized him, but as the number of derogatory terms was too high to be fully explored in the scope of the present study, it would be interesting to carry out a more comprehensive research to exclusively study insult terms in the president’s tweets.