Interruption as a reflection of speaker’s identity in the 2020 US presidential debates

Abstract

The article establishes the role of interruption as a key communicative strategy which defined the character of the 2020 US presidential debates. It is posited that the participants of the debates, namely Donald Trump and Joseph Biden, realized how effective certain types of linguistic behavior could be and deliberately used specific communicative tactics to achieve better results and win the voters’ support. Some of the strategies that the participants resorted to were merely situational; however, most of the strategies identified in the research had a recurrent nature representing the debating styles of the politicians. It is also assumed in the study that repeated breaches of a normal turn–taking process such as systemic interruptions have the potential to modify the public perception of the politician’s communicative styles, which are seen in the paper as inherent components of the politicians’ identities.