Insults on Donald Trump’s Twitter: A Study of Pragmatics

Abstract

As one of the most used social media platforms, twitter has become a powerful tool for a number of purposes, including personal and business promotions as well as social communication. As for the political celebrities, it is considered to be the fastest way to communicate with their fans, friends or even their haters. Donald Trump is the former of 45th President of the United States and also a frequent user of twitter who often posts controversial or false statements. On July 16, 2019, the House of Representatives voted to censure him for “racist comments”. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to analyze the utterances of insults on Donald Trump’s Twitter account using descriptive qualitative research method, before and after Trump became the president of the United States and will look at the utterances, forms and references. The insult utterances of Trump’s illocutionary speech acts that were found and then to be classified into (1) abusive swearing, (2) swearing, (3) obscenity, focusing on Searle’s five classification of speech acts which consist of (1) representatives, (2) directives, (3) commissives, (4) expressives, and (5) declarations.