On the Use of Interpersonal Metadiscourse Markers in Donald Trump’s Speech

Interpersonal metadiscourse plays an important role for a politician in interaction with his/her audience since it facilitates the communication between the text, the producer and the receiver. The main aim of this study is to investigate how interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers are used by Donald Trump in his speech. In line with the aim of the study, the researchers make use of descriptive qualitative method to describe the types and the functions of the interpersonal metadiscourse markers used in the US president’s speech. Also, we use Hyland’s (2005) framework to analyze the data because it is a more elaborated and convincing model for metadiscourse categorization.The results show that there are two categories of interpersonal metadiscourse markers used in Trump’s speech: interactive and interpersonal metadiscourse. There are 288 (51.70%) interactive metadiscourse and 269 (48.29%) interactional metadiscourse in this speech. Kinds of interactive metadiscourse found in Trump’s speech are 252 (45.24%) transitions, 16 (2.87%) frame markers, 5 (0.89%) endophoric markers, 5 (0.89%) evidentials and 10 (1.79%) code glosses. Kinds of interactional metadiscourse found in this speech are 14 (2.51%) hedges, 41 (7.36%) boosters, 14 (2.51%) attitude markers, 170 (30.52%) self mentions and 30 (5.28%) engagement markers.Results show that transitions are the dominant interactive metadiscourse markers and self mentions are the dominant interactional metadiscourse markers in Trump’s speech. Also, findings indicate that endophoric markers and evidentials are the least frequent interactive markers. Hedges and attitude markers are the least frequent interactional markers in this speech. We can conclude that Trump tended to use transition markers to help the audience determine the logical relationships between propositions. Also, self mentions are the most frequently used interactional markers because when he speaks about his opinions, he gives statements to the audience. Findings manifested that metadiscourse markers play a significant role in political speech.

Keywords:

metadiscourse , interpersonal metadiscourse , interactive metadiscourse , interactional metadiscourse , Hyland’s model of metadiscourse , Donald Trump , political speech