Anthropolinguistic Tools to Study Political Linguistics. The Case of Donald Trump’s 2020 Campaign Discourse

The paper presents an anthropolinguistic study of Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential campaign discourse. The study can be situated within the scope of political linguistics. The interdisciplinary method of research applied here rests upon the understanding of human communication functioning in terms of communicational grammars of specific discourses that comprise rules of language use set against the background of immediate contexts of use. The key idea underbracing this study is that language is a rule-governed, conventions-based system of practice (e.g., de Saussure [1916] 2011, Sapir 1921, Hymes 1972, Saville–Troike [1982] 2003, Lucy [1996] 1999) and a conventional type of performance which allows for building a nexus of typified relations. Another overarching goal of this paper is to show that human interaction is mostly both a structurally hardwired and functionally (pragmatically) driven linguistic practice. The analysis sets out to explore Donald Trump’s texts according to the Anthropolinguistic Model of Communication (AMC) (Strukowska 2022) as a pattern recognition model that provides a contextual overview of elements of communication and functions as a solid platform for documenting discursive practices (Chruszczewski 2011: 199–263).