Pragmatic deviation in Trump's political discourse

Research on deviation of pragmatic principles in political discourse is scarce as researchers have given much attention to other types of linguistic deviation, such as grammatical and semantic ones. Moreover, there is a dearth of studies that integrate the pragmatic principles and how these principles are violated in a given context. The study was meant to investigate pragmatic deviation in US President Donald Trump’s political discourse. It aimed at discovering the pragmatic principles: Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle (conversational maxims), Searle’s (1969) speech act theory (felicity conditions of speech acts), and Leech’s (2014) (im)politeness model (impoliteness maxims), in Trump’s political discourse. Furthermore, it intended to examine the alignment and discordance between these pragmatic principles in Trump’s political discourse. A qualitative descriptive approach was used to collect and analyze data. The research adopted three oral documents that were taken from YouTube. These are (1) Trump’s speech to a group of his supporters in Illinois, (2) Trump’s meeting with Broadcasters MacCallum and Baier on Fox News Channel, and (3) Trump’s interview with Broadcaster Cooper on CNN Channel. The researcher adapted a codebook that consists of the concepts from the three adopted models. The study adopts a discourse analysis method to analyze Trump’s discourse. The findings of this study showed that Trump deviates from all pragmatic principles to achieve certain goals, such as insulting rivals, galvanizing electoral support, delegitimizing adversaries, inciting opposition to Biden’s government, and disseminating unconfirmed claims. In addition, the research emphasizes how these principles interconnect—aligning or discording—within particular situations of pragmatic violations. This study uncovers how political discourse tactically employs the principles of pragmatics to fuel polarization. Future studies would investigate non-observance in various situations (media, literary works) and utilize these for intercultural, longitudinal examinations of argumentative interaction