Cover not available
Article published In:
Public Debates on Immigration
Edited by Andreas Musolff
[Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 5:2] 2017
► pp. 295–322

Xenophobic Trumpeters

A corpus-assisted discourse study of Donald Trump's Facebook conversations

 | Saginaw Valley State University, USA
Immigration has been and remains a conspicuous topic in American political debate, and the ongoing refugee crisis in Europe, exasperated by the Syrian conflict, has brought the issue of Muslim immigration into focus. The topic has been exploited, among others, by the presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. His proposal to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. achieved great resonance and stimulated passionate discussion. This discussion, which displayed a high degree of xenophobia and verbal aggression, is the target of this paper’s investigation. Material was collected from Trump’s official Facebook page and was analyzed using Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistic methods. The results highlight the strategies employed in discourse that aims to posit Muslims as “Others” and as incompatible with American society, as well as dangerous, aggressive, and inferior, through the choice of semantic, syntactic, and rhetorical discursive structures.
Keywords: social media, xenophobia, immigration, Muslims, Critical Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Critical discourse analysis
    • 2.2Corpus linguistics tools
  • 3.Research questions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1The corpus
    • 4.2Frequency
    • 4.3Concordance
    • 4.4Collocation
    • 4.5Collostruction
    • 4.6Procedure
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Frequency
    • 5.2KWIC analysis
    • 5.3Metaphors
    • 5.4Collocational data
    • 5.5Collostructures
    • 5.6Agency and semantics
  • 6.Conclusions
  • 7.Limitations and future research
  • References
Published online: 23 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlac.5.2.07kno
References (57)
References
Akbarzadeh, Shahram, and Bianca Smith. 2005. The Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media. Melbourne: Monash University.Google Scholar
Awass, Omer. 1996. “The Representation of Islam in the American Media.” Hamdard Islamicus 19(3):87–102.Google Scholar
Baider, Fabienne, and Maria Constantinou. 2014. “How to Make People Feel Good When Wishing Hell: Golden Dawn and National Front Discourse, Emotions and Argumentation.” In Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2014, edited by Jesus Romero-Trillo, 179–210. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul, and Tony McEnery. 2005. “A Corpus-Based Approach to Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in UN and Newspaper Texts.” Journal of Language and Politics 4(2):197–226. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, Majid Khosravinik, Michal Krzyżanowski, Tony McEnery, and Ruth Wodak. 2008. “A Useful Methodological Synergy? Combining Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics to Examine Discourses of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press.” Discourse & Society 19(3):273–306. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, and Tony McEnery. 2012. “Sketching Muslims: A Corpus Driven Analysis of Representations Around the Word ‘Muslim’ in the British Press 1998–2009.” Applied Linguistics 341:255–278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Billig, Michael. 1988. “The Notion of ‘Prejudice’: Some Rhetorical and Ideological Aspects.” Text-Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 8(1–2):91–110. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brigadir, Igor, Derek Greene, and Padraig Cunninghamg. 2015. “Analyzing Discourse Communities with Distributional Semantic Models.” Presentation at the 2015 ACM Web Science Conference, Oxford, United Kingdom. [URL] DOI logo
Caldas-Coulthard, Carmen Rosa. 1993. “From Discourse Analysis to Critical Discourse Analysis: The Differential Representation of Women and Men Speaking in Written News.” In Techniques of Description: Spoken and Written Discourse, edited by Gwyneth Fox, Michael Hoey, and John M. Sinclair, 196–208. London, New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cap, Piotr. 2014. “Applying Cognitive Pragmatics to Critical Discourse Studies: A Proximization Analysis of Three Public Space Discourses.” Journal of Pragmatics 701:16–30. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cisneros, J. David. 2008. “Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration.” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11(4):569–601. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2008-. “The Corpus of Contemporary American English: 520 million words, 1990-Present.” [URL].
Dunn, Kevin. 2001. “Representations of Islam in the Politics of Mosque Development in Sydney.” Tijdschrit voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 92(3):291–308. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. Language and Power. London: Longman.Google Scholar
. 1995. Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar
Flowerdew, Lynne. 2004. “The Argument for Using English Specialized Corpora to Understand Academic and Professional Settings.” In Discourse in the Professions: Perspectives from Corpus Linguistics, edited by Ulla Connor and Thomas A. Upton, 11–33. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gabrielatos, Costas, and Paul Baker. 2008. “Fleeing, Sneaking, Flooding: A Corpus Analysis of Discursive Constructions of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in the UK Press, 1996–2005.” Journal of English Linguistics 36(1):5–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gattino, Silvia, and Stefano Tartaglia. 2015. “The Effect of Television Viewing on Ethnic Prejudice Against Immigrants: A Study in The Italian Context.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 441:46–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hafez, Kai. 2000. Islam and the West in the Mass Media: Fragmented Images in a Globalizing World. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.Google Scholar
Hart, Christopher. 2013. “Argumentation Meets Adapted Cognition: Manipulation in Media Discourse on Immigration.” Journal of Pragmatics 591:200–209. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hart, Christopher, and Piotr Cap. eds. 2014. Contemporary Critical Discourse Studies. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Hunston, Susan. 2002. Corpora in Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kassimeris, George, and Leoni Jackson. 2015. “The Ideology and Discourse of the English Defence League: ‘Not Racist, Not Violent, Just No Longer Silent’.” The British Journal of Politics & International Relations 17(1):171–188. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam, Vit Baisa, Jan Bušta, Milos Jakubíček, Vojtech Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychly, and Vit Suchomel. 2014. “The Sketch Engine: Ten years on.” Lexicography 1(1):7–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam, Pavel Rychly, Pavel Smrz, and David Tugwell. 2004. “The Sketch Engine.” In Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX International Congress, edited by Geoffrey Williams and Sandra Vessier, 105–115. Google Scholar
Koester, Almut. 2010. “Building Small Specialised Corpora.” In The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, edited by Anne O’Keeffe and Michael McCarthy, 66–79. New York, NY: Routledge DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krishnamurthy, Ramesh. 1996. “Ethnic, Racial and Tribal: The Language of Racism.” In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Malcolm Coulthard, 129–149. London; New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lewis, Justin M. W., Paul Mason, and Kerry Moore. 2011. “Images of Islam in the UK: The Representation of British Muslims in the National Press 2000–2008.” In Pointing the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media, edited by Julian Petley and Robin Richardson, 40–65. Oxford: Oneworld.Google Scholar
Lirola, Maria Martinez. Ed. 2014. Discourses on Immigration in Times of Economic Crisis: A Critical Perspective. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Mamadouh, Virginie. 2012. “The Scaling of The ‘Invasion’: A Geopolitics of Immigration Narratives in France and The Netherlands.” Geopolitics 17(2):377–401. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mårtensson, Ulrika. 2014. “Hate Speech and Dialogue in Norway: Muslims ‘Speak Back’.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40(2):230–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mautner, Gerlinde. 2009. “Checks and Balances: How Corpus Linguistics Can Contribute to CDA.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 122–141. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Musolff, Andreas. 2015. “Dehumanizing Metaphors in UK Immigrant Debates in Press and Online Media.” Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3(1):41–56. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Keeffe, Anne, Michael McCarthy, and Ronald Carter. 2007. From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Orpin, Debbie. 2005. “Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis: Examining the Ideology of Sleaze.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 10(1):37–61. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Partington, Alan. 2006. “Metaphors, Motifs and Similes across Discourse Types: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) At Work.” Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 1711:267–304. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Perren, Lew, and Charles Dannreuther. 2013. “Political Signification of the Entrepreneur: Temporal Analysis of Constructs, Agency and Reification.” International Small Business Journal 31(6):603–628. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prentice, Sheryl, and Andrew Hardie. 2009. “Empowerment and Disempowerment in the Glencairn Uprising: A Corpus-based Critical Analysis of Early Modern English News Discourse.” Journal of Historical Pragmatics 10(1):23–55. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reisigl, Martin, and Wodak, Ruth. 2001. Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Richardson, John E. 2004a. (Mis)Representing Islam: The Racism and Rhetoric of British Broadsheet Newspapers. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2004b. Islamophobia: Issues, Challenges and Action. Trent, UK: Trentham Books.Google Scholar
Rojo, Luisa Martin, and Teun A. van Dijk. 1997. “‘There Was A Problem, And It Was Solved!’: Legitimating the Expulsion of Illegal Migrants in Spanish Parliamentary Discourse.” Discourse & Society 8(4):523–566. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Salama, Amir H. Y. 2011. “Ideological Collocation and the Recontexualization of Wahhabi-Saudi Islam Post-9/11: A Synergy of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis. Discourse & Society 22(3):315–342. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, Concordance, Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Smolla, Rodney. 1992. Free Speech in an Open Society. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Stefanowitsch, Aanatol, and Stefan T. Gries. 2003. “Collostructions: Investigating the Interaction of Words and Constructions.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8 (2):209–243. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Steuter, Erin, and Deborah Wills. 2010. “‘The Vermin Have Struck Again’: Dehumanizing the Enemy in Post 9/11 Media Representations.” Media, War & Conflict 3(2):152–167. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 1992. “Institutional Linguistics: Language and Institutions, Linguistics and Sociology.” In Thirty Years of Linguistic Evolution, edited by Martin Putz, 189–214. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. 1991. Racism and the Press. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun A. 1993. “Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. Discourse & Society 4 (2):249–283. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Dijk, Tuen A. 2000a. “On the Analysis of Parliamentary Debates on Immigration.” The Semiotics of Racism: Approaches to Critical Discourse Analysis, edited by Martin Reisigl and Ruth Wodak, 85–103. Vienna: Passagen Verlag.Google Scholar
van Dijk, Teun A. 2000b. “The Reality of Racism: On Analyzing Parliamentary Debates on Immigration.” In Festschrift Für die Wirklichkeit, edited by Guido Zurstiege, 211–226. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006. “Discourse and Manipulation.” Discourse & Society 17(3):359–383. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
van Leeuwen, Theo, and Ruth Wodak. 1999. “Legitimizing Immigration Control: A Discourse-Historical Analysis.” Discourse Studies 1(1):83–118. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth. Ed. 1989. Language, Power and Ideology: Studies in Political Discourse (Vol. 71). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Meyer, Michael. (2015). “Critical Discourse Studies: History, Agenda, Theory and Methodology.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (3rd edition), edited by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 1–22. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Wodak, Ruth, and Teun A. van Dijk. Eds. 2000. Racism at the Top: The Investigation, Explanation and Countering of Xenophobia and Racism. Klagenfurt: Drava.Google Scholar
Cited by (11)

Cited by 11 other publications

Junnier, Frances & Galina Shleykina
2024. Contesting spaces. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict DOI logo
Billig, Michael
2023. The national nature of globalization and the global nature of nationalism: Historically and methodologically entangled. Theory & Psychology 33:2 ► pp. 175 ff. DOI logo
Mattiello, Elisa
2023. Slang and verbal aggression. Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 11:1 ► pp. 101 ff. DOI logo
Dyvik Cardona, Margrete
2022. More than just an immigrant: The semantic patterns of (im)migrant/predicate-pairings in news stories about Mexican and Central American (im)migrants to the USA. A corpus-assisted discourse study. Discourse & Communication 16:3 ► pp. 285 ff. DOI logo
Franza, Jasmin, Bojan Evkoski & Darja Fišer
2022. Emotion analysis in socially unacceptable discourse. Slovenščina 2.0: empirical, applied and interdisciplinary research 10:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Hamed, Dalia
2021. Keywords and collocations in US presidential discourse since 1993: a corpus-assisted analysis. Journal of Humanities and Applied Social Sciences 3:2 ► pp. 137 ff. DOI logo
Cheng, Winnie & Phoenix Lam
2020. Ideology in Media Discourse. In The Cambridge Introduction to Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 339 ff. DOI logo
Susan Conrad, Alissa Hartig & Lynn Santelmann
2020. The Cambridge Introduction to Applied Linguistics, DOI logo
Conrad, Susan, Alissa J. Hartig & Lynn Santelmann
2020. The Path Forward. In The Cambridge Introduction to Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 388 ff. DOI logo
Knoblock, Natalia
2020. Negotiating dominance on Facebook: Positioning of self and others in pro- and anti-Trump comments on immigration. Discourse & Society 31:5 ► pp. 520 ff. DOI logo
Knoblock, Natalia
2020. Trump’s Text Appeal: Vague Language in Post-Truth Politics. In Discursive Approaches to Populism Across Disciplines, ► pp. 119 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.