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Article published In: Pragmatics
Vol. 32:1 (2022) ► pp.104–130

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Out-grouping and ambient affiliation in Donald Trump’s tweets about Iran

Exploring the role of negative evaluation in enacting solidarity

ORCiD logo with link | University of New South Wales
ORCiD logo with link | University of New South Wales
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 23 August 2021
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https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20048.mak
Abstract
This paper explores communing affiliation and out-grouping in a corpus of Trump’s tweets about Iran. Communing is a form of ‘ambient affiliation’ (Zappavigna, Michele. 2011. “Ambient Affiliation: A Linguistic Perspective on Twitter.” New Media & Society 131, no. 51: 788–806. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar) which offers a way of understanding how Trump attempts to build alignments with his audience without necessarily directly engaging with them, since he tends to ignore replies to his tweets. The paper focuses on three affiliation strategies: convoking (mustering community), promoting (garnering attention), and finessing (dialogistic positioning). It draws on Martin, J. R., and P. R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar Appraisal framework to consider how these affiliation strategies are used to foster communing around ideation-attitude couplings, typically couplings associating Iran with negative judgement or appreciation. Promoting affiliation was found to be the most prominent affiliation strategy used by Trump to garner attention through his rhetorical tendency toward hyperbole.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Trump’s negativity on Twitter
    • 1.2Background on Iran-US relations
    • 1.3The structure of this article
  • 2.Theoretical framework: Appraisal, and dialogic and communing affiliation
    • 2.1The Appraisal framework
    • 2.2Dialogic affiliation
    • 2.3Communing affiliation
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Construing negative attitude about Iran
  • 5.Communing affiliation strategies employed by Trump
    • 5.1Convoking as a strategy for mustering Trump’s base
    • 5.2Finessing as a strategy for closing down the “outgroups”
    • 5.3Promoting as a strategy for garnering attention and emphasising values
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
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