Investigating thematic choices in Trump's Tweets on the U.S.-Mexico Wall: Political Discourse on Social Media (2020)
Alyousef, Hesham Suleiman . 2020
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 of building the wall is one of the global issues that have been widely discussed in social media and American media 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 Corpus Tool 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 the textual Theme. Interpersonal Theme was rarely employed. Trump tends to use a simple, direct, and spontaneous language to make the 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.
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