14 January 2017

Linguistic analysis

He don't speak proper.  The Guardian reports:
1) Trump uses a pretty small working vocabulary. This doesn’t seem to be a conscious strategy, though it works as well as if it had been. Much was made during primary season of the way in which reading-level algorithms (unreliable though they are) found his speeches pitched at fourth-grade level, ie the comprehension of an average nine-year-old.
2) His syntax, spelling and punctuation are – in conventional terms – a catastrophe. In his tweets, he is prone to run-on sentences, shouty capitalisations, unpresidented misspellings and malapropisms, quote marks used for emphasis and verbless exclamations. In speaking, he is prone to anacoluthon – sentences whose grammar collapses – and reflexive repetition.
3) The workhorses of his rhetoric are charged but empty adjectives and adverbs.Things are “great”, “wonderful”, “amazing”, “the best”, or they’re “crooked”, “fake”, “unfair”, “failing”. He sprinkles intensifiers liberally: “a very, very, very amazing man, a great, great developer”.
Plus, he tells fibs.

Doesn't seem to matter when it comes to connecting with the voters ...

 
 

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