Bullying in trump’s tweets through Covid-19: A pragmatic perspective

Abstract

Nowadays, everyone can witness the importance of the internet and the role it plays as a means of communication. Tweeter is one of the best social networking websites now. This type of social media, people create an online profile through enlisting personal facts and interests, connect with other users, and sharing updates of information that is posted daily (Hargittai and Hsieh, 2011: 47). Besides the positive sides that such media have, there are some negative issues that these media may reflect. Bulling is one of these negatives.

Pragmatically, this paper concerns itself with studying cyberbullying in Trump’s tweeters. Consequently, the data will be analyzed according to some pragmatic theories like politeness, implicature, and pragmatic metaphor. The questions that the paper tries to answer are: (1) Does Trump use a direct bully or indirect one? (2) What are the polite strategies that Trump tries to use in order to minimize the effect of bullying? (3) Are there any implied meanings in Trump’s tweeters that he wants to convey? To answer these questions, the following aims are put: (1) showing whether Trump uses an explicit bullying or an implicit one, (2) clarifying the polite strategies that Trump may use in his tweeters, (3) shedding light on the implied meanings in Trump’s tweeters. Working on these aims, the following hypotheses are suggested: (1) Trump uses explicit and implicit bullying in his tweeters, (2) there are certain strategies that Trump follows in his bullying, and (3) there are some implied meanings (implicature) that Trump is behind.