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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 25, No. 0, pp.786-803
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2025
Received 24 Jan 2025 Revised 29 Mar 2025 Accepted 20 Apr 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.25..202506.786

A Corpus-Based Study of Stylistic Variation of Donald Trump’s Political Discourse: Identity, Setting, and Audience

Yuling Yi ; Yaochen Deng ; Se-Eun Jhang
(First author) PhD student, The School of English Studies Dalian University of Foreign Languages 6 West Section, South Lushun Road, Dalian 116044, Liaoning, China yiyuling_8@163.com
(Co-author) Professor, The School of English Studies Dalian University of Foreign Languages 6 West Section, South Lushun Road, Dalian 116044, Liaoning, China deng_yaochen@163.com
(Corresponding author) Professor, Department of English Language and Literature National Korea Maritime and Ocean University 727 Taejong-ro, Yeongdo-Gu, Busan 49112, Republic of Korea jhang@kmou.ac.kr


© 2025 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Extralinguistic factors, which refer to the non-linguistic factors such as class, topic, age etc., play a central role in a speaker’s stylistic variation and can elicit stylistic variation. This study examines stylistic variation in Donald Trump’s political discourse, focusing on the discourse markers “actually” and “in fact” across three extralinguistic factors/dimensions: identity, setting, and audience. Results reveal systematic patterns in Trump’s use of “actually” and “in fact,” with “actually” increasing sharply in informal, interactive contexts during his presidential and post-presidential periods (identity dimension). Dialogic contexts (setting dimension) exhibited the highest combined frequencies of both markers, reflecting greater interactivity and clarification. Similarly, local audience speeches (audience dimension) favored “actually,” emphasizing intimacy and informality. These findings demonstrate that Trump’s stylistic variation is systematically shaped by extralinguistic factors, contributing to a deeper understanding of political discourse. The study underscores the importance of multidimensional stylistic analysis and suggests future research incorporating additional linguistic features, such as prosody and syntactic variation, to explore broader patterns in diverse social contexts.

Keywords:

stylistic variation, extralinguistic factors, political discourse, discourse markers, corpus-based study

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