Means of expression of negative emotions in Donald Trump’s Twitter: lexical and statistical analysis

Pavlova E. K.

The article is devoted to the study of the specifics of the vocabulary used by D. Trump when conducting political discourse in the Twitter messenger. The choice of lexical and stylistic means is determined both by the basic characteristics of Donald Trump's linguistic personality (emotionality, categoricalness and harshness of statements, disregard for the standards of "political correctness"), and by peculiarities of the communicative space (the limited length of the message forces the use of a lapidary style, the absence of pre-moderation gives a certain freedom in expressions, the broadness of the audience requires simplicity and comprehensibility of messages). The vocabulary of Donald Trump's tweets is distinguished by the wide use of negatively coloured emotional and evaluative expressions, nicknames, interjections and exclamations. Lexical and statistical analysis of the complete set of 30599 D. Trump's tweets for the period from 2016 to 2020 made it possible to compile a frequency dictionary of the negative emotional-evaluative vocabulary used in them, to identify the most frequent lexemes and the main contexts of their use.

Keywords:political discourse, D. Trump, statistical linguistics, vocabulary, emotions