![]() ![]() We found that Trump and his team employed an increasingly disengaged style over the course of the campaign-essentially presenting their opinions as facts and ignoring alternative viewpoints. And I think we show there was an underlying strategy-that they were shifting the styles of their tweets to achieve certain communicative goals. So our aim was to describe how they used Twitter from a linguistic perspective-not to understand if it was effective but to understand why it was effective. We also know it was a big part of how Trump and his campaign chose to communicate with the public. The amount of free media coverage the account generated during the campaign is well documented. I think, to a large extent, we knew that was going on. For example, we found that a more informal and conversational style was used during the Republican primaries, compared with the general election.ĭid you discover that Trump and his campaign were successfully using Twitter as an alternative communication medium? ![]() Rather we found a lot of stylistic variation-and crucially, we found this variation was, on the whole, fairly systematic over time: the style of tweets changed in clear ways, depending on what was happening in the campaign. Our main takeaway was that Trump’s Twitter account wasn’t just a bunch of random attacks, as is sometimes claimed by the media. We then interpreted these dimensions stylistically and plotted them over time to understand how the style of the account changed. We thought that perspective was largely missing from the discussion-and important.īasically, we downloaded all the tweets that were posted on the account, removed the retweets, automatically identified a wide range of grammatical features found in each tweet (such as various parts of speech) and then conducted a statistical analysis to extract dimensions of linguistic variation, based on which features tended to occur together in tweets. But looking at the structure of language-how something is said-is what linguists do. ![]() In general, when most people look at language, they focus on what is said. The account was so important during the election and such a point of contention-we thought this was an area where linguistic analysis could be informative. Why did you think it was important to bring linguistic methods to the study of a president’s tweets? After that study, we decided to look at stylistic variation on account more generally-and especially to track changes in style over time. We found it was relatively unusual in its style, although we couldn’t rule out the possibility that Trump had written it. We do research on both social media language and authorship analysis, so we decided to look at that tweet. But his lawyer , John Dowd, then took credit for it. ![]() īack in 2017 there was a lot of talk about whether Trump wrote a specific tweet that might have amounted to an admission of obstructing justice. Scientific American asked Grieve about his trek through the Trump tweet corpus and the richness of Twitter as a source for linguists. (Such “style shifting”-how an individual’s language varies from one situation to another-is a subdiscipline in linguistics.) One tweet style transmuted into another-and then sometimes back-as Trump progressed from his role as peddler of a fake “birther” conspiracy theory to improbable presidential primary candidate to Republican nominee-and then to occupier of the Oval Office. Others dispensed advice or campaign rhetoric or simply signaled Trump’s engagement on a particular issue. The researchers categorized the different styles by scrutinizing the tweets’ grammatical structure. (“Linguistic style” here refers to the form of the text, not its meaning.) A study published Wednesday in PLOS One shows how the linguistic style of Trump’s 21,739 tweets from mid-2009 to early 2018 (excluding retweets) morphed as his strategy for reaching multitudes of followers changed. Now Grieve and his linguist colleague Isobelle Clarke have turned their analytic expertise to President Donald Trump’s Twitter account. Another study he conducted looked for new word usages spreading on American social media (“baeless” for single, for example, and “senpai” for elder or expert). (“crap” is big in the center of the country “f-” turns up more on the coasts). One of his projects examined the regional popularity of profanity in the U.S. In recent years, Jack Grieve of the department of English and linguistics at the University of Birmingham in England has embraced Twitter as a bountiful lode for looking at language-use patterns. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |