Pragmatic Analysis of Presupposition in Trump's Speech

Abstract

Arrogance is a human psychological belief of being on the top of all
things. This means that an arrogant person sees himself as the center around
which others revolve. Pragmatically, arrogance can be seen in terms of
language use, that is, an arrogant person likes to resort to certain pragmatic
strategies to appear as a person who is superior to others. There is no limit
to which pragmatic strategies arrogant people might rely on. Nevertheless,
some of these strategies can be investigated in a certain illustrative example
which can be culled from a certain context. It seems, as observed by this
study, that this topic has not been given its scholarly pragmatic attention. To
bridge this gap in the literature, a certain type of data can be scrutinized to
discover the pragmatic aspects of arrogance in it. In this respect, the present
study sets itself the task of pragmatically dealing with this particular issue.
To attain this goal, this work attempts to answer the following question:
What is the pragmatics of arrogance in Trump's "America First" foreign
policy speech? In association with this aim, it is hypothesized that Donald
Trump uses certain pragmatic strategies which reveal his arrogant nature. In
this regard, he is expected to employ commissure speech acts such as threats
and promises, and exploit different types of devices to trigger
presuppositions of various types. Besides, he appeals to some pragmatic
functions of exaggeration. In order to achieve the aim of the paper and
verify or reject its hypothesis, an analytical pragmatic framework is
developed to analyze the data under scrutiny. Additionally, a statistical
method represented by the percentage equation is used to calculate the
results. The most important finding arrived at by this study is that Donald
Trump most often resorts to the strategies of promising and threatening.
Furthermore, he uses presupposition triggers, and resorts to exaggeration
through exploiting the devices of repetition and manipulation