Investigating Thematic Choices in Trump’s Tweets on the U.S.–Mexico Wall: Political Discourse on Social Media

(Hesham Suleiman Alyousef, Najd Emad Q. Alotaibi)

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Abstract

Trump declared his intention to build a wall along the U.S.–Mexico border during his presidential campaign in 2016. On 4 January, 2019, President Trump sent a letter to members of the U.S. Congress on the need to build a long wall to secure the U.S. border. This led local news reporters to discuss this political issue and its effects on the American and Mexican populations. Since Trump’s decision to build the wall is one of the global issues that has been widely discussed in social media and American news agencies, it is pertinent to analyze thematic choices in Trump’s tweets on the U.S.–Mexico border wall issue. The present study aims to investigate Trump’s thematic choices, employing Halliday's systemic functional linguistics’ approach. UAM CorpusTool software was employed in the annotation of theme types. The results of the study showed that topical theme was the most frequent theme type in Trumps’ tweets, followed by textual theme. Interpersonal theme was rarely employed. Trump tends to use simple, direct, and spontaneous language to make his communication style with his audience more natural and less complex. The study contributes to our understanding of theme types in political discourse on social media.

KEYWORDS
Systemic functional linguistics, Donald Trump’s discourse, social media discourse

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