How much can you say in a tweet? An approach to political argumentation on Twitter

Abstract

Besides Donald Trump, its most famous user, some 330 million people use Twitter as a platform for communication, much of it political. Yet, given the 280 character limit, how much can you say in a tweet? Although much has already been written about Twitter, little attention has been given to the nature of the argument found there. To begin filling this gap, it is necessary to identify the basic units of such an argument. Identifying them as speech acts, we demonstrate here by discourse analysis how by virtue of the enthymematic quality of public argument, much argument can be communicated even by singular speech acts and even by speech acts other than assertion.