Browsing by Subject "Xenophobia"

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is an interdisciplinary approach that is used to analyze the relations between discourse and social practice. CDA has a normative aim by addressing social wrongs (such as misuse of power) via the use of language. This study uses Gee’s (1996) method of discourse analysis, which focuses on prosody, cohesion, discourse organization, contextualization signals, and thematic organization, on seven COVID-19-related tweets by Donald Trump, the president of the United States (2017–2021). This qualitative approach analyzes how Trump’s COVID-19-related tweets feature misuse of power and whether these tweets are populist by nature. The study also has a quantitative approach which features a corpus of 640 COVID-19-related tweets from Trump from January 2020 to January 2021. This demonstrates how often Trump used neutral terms versus Sinophobic (xenophobic towards China) terms to refer to the coronavirus, the disease, and the pandemic. The quantitative results also feature a list of the most frequently used words in the tweets which were generated by the corpus software AntConc. The qualitative findings showed that Trump’s COVID-related tweets featured ambiguous and unjustified claims, logical fallacies and were often self-centered. The tweets that featured Sinophobic terms were, contrary to expectations, more hostile towards Trump’s political opponents and the media than China. The quantitative results showed that Trump used neutral terms such as ‘COVID’ or ‘Coronavirus’ more often than Sinophobic ones, although after excluding retweets, the difference was less significant. The most frequently featured words in Trump’s tweets support the qualitative finding that many of his tweets were especially hostile towards his political opponents and the media. Applying CDA to tweets, which have merely a 280-character limit, is somewhat of an unorthodox approach. However, this qualitative approach enabled a much more nuanced analysis of the tweets than a purely quantitative result would have done. In this study, especially the findings on Trump’s argumentation tactics and the cohesion in the tweets are applicable in future studies. As one of CDA’s advantages is its interdisciplinarity, similar approaches that draw from different sciences may be taken to analyze similar political discourses in the future.