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Rhetoric and Psycholinguistics- a structured approach to understanding Trump's language.
Bernice Rogowitz
Rhetoric
Aristotle: Rhetoric is the art of finding the best available means of pursuading a specific audience in a specific situation.
Plato: Rhetoric is "the art of winning the soul by discourse.
Three Methods- the Rhetoric triangle
Ethos- presenting the trustworthiness and authority of the speaker, First person (I, we)
Pathos- speaking to the emotions and deeply-held beliefs of the audience. Second person (you)
Logos- using logic, reasoning and evidence of the subject. Third person (He/she, they)
First person: I have a dream
First person plural: We hold these truths to be self evident...
Second Person: "Ask not what your country can do you for; ask what you can do for your country: (JFK)
"Look at Paris..." (Trump)
Aristotle: "An emotional speaker always makes his audience feel with him, even when there is nothing in his arguments; which is why many speakers try to overwhelm their audience by meter noise"
Aristotle: "If a rhetorician and a doctor visited any city you like to name and they had to contend in argument before the Assembly or any other gathering as to which of the two should be chosen as doctor, the doctor would be nowhere, but the man who could speak would be chosen, if he so wished" (From Gorgias)
The goal of Rhetoric- grab and keep attention, and to make ideas and phrase stick in your head. Modern example: Marketing and branding. Rhetoric can ispire and motivate- the best and the worst in people.
Figures of Speech- consciously chosen ways of expressing arguments, thoughts and ideas
Shakespeare and the great rhetoricians used two hundred figures of speech. They knew which figures expressed which emotion, and used them to get the desired emotional effect.
Hyperbole-
From The Art of the Deal (Trump, 1987)
"The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people's fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular". "I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration-- and a very effective form of promotion."
In reality= it is lying, while excusing and rationalizing.
Is it innocent? The key purpose of hyperbole is to express the emotion of anger-- According to Aristotle, "Hyperboles show vehemence of character, and this is why angry people use them more than other people."
Trump's supporters are angry, and he's showing them that he is angry too. More effective than to say "I understand your anger" Pathos.
Build a wall and make Mexico pay for it
The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese
When asked by Sanders if he really believed this statement, Trump said it was "obviously a joke," and then followed up with "Obviously, I joke. But, this is done for the benefit of China.
(Truthful hyperbole allows Trump to spout lies but speak them as emotional truths, that, when caught, allow him to claim that he "obviously" doesn't actually believe-- even as he repeats the lie again.)
Believe me: "Many people are saying..." or "Believe me" — often right after saying something that is baseless or untrue. This tends to sound more trustworthy to listeners than just outright stating the baseless claim, since Trump implies that he has direct experience with what he’s talking about. At a base level, Lakoff argues, people are more inclined to believe something that seems to have been shared.
Repetition-- Words repeated to hammer home the impact; Phrases repeated to enhance memorability
Quick, pithy, easy to grasp messages: "Make America Great Again." "Politicians are all talk, no action." "Crooked Hillary" "Let's take their oil."
Ending sentences with memorable take-home messages (Serial position effect)
Phony Reluctance (Apophasis- from the Greek, to deny)
Empasize a point by pretending to deny it.
Cicero-- "I will not even mention the fact that you betrayed us in the Roman people by aiding Catiline (63 BC).
Trump-
"I was going to say dummy Bush; I won't say it. I won't say it."
I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a binbo, because that would not be politically correct"
I promised I would not say that she [Carly Fiorinia] ran Hewlett-Packard into the ground, that she laid off tens of thousands of people, and she got viciously fired. Iwill not say it, so I will not say it.
II Speech Analysis:
Simplicity vs. Complexity in Word selection
1. Syllables per word
2. Words per sentence
Flesch Kinkaid Reading Ease Metric:
Minimum score: 1 sentence, two words, each word one syllable, e.g., "He runs."
206.835 - 1.015 x 2 - 84.6 x 1 = 120.205
Grade 6 student essay: 60-70
Reader's Digest: 65
Time magazine: 52
Florida requirement for life insurance policies >45
Harvard Law Review low 30s
Flesch Kinkaid Grade Level Metric:
Another parameterization of the same measures, producing a metric scaled to US grade levels. NB: The grade-level metric puts more emphasis on sentence length than word length. Theoretical minimum: -3.4 (all monosyllabic words). Green Eggs and Ham is -1.3 (5.7 words per sentence; 1.02 syllables per word)
Grade Level for historical Political speeches:
Historical Precedence:
President George Washington’s “Farewell Address” in 1796 was written at graduate-degree levels: Grade 17.9
President Abraham Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address” in 1863 was at an 11th-grade level.
Grade level of speeches from members of Congress had declined, from 11.3 in 1996 to 10.6 in 2012 (Sunlight Foundation, 2012)
Grade scores for Presidential State of the Union addresses have steadily declined. John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1961 was at a Grade 13.9 level, while President Obama’s have been aimed at an eighth-grade audience.
Modern Politicians:
Boston Globe Study 2016
Discussion:
Is this just the rambling of an incoherent mind? " His speech suggests a man with scattered thoughts, a short span of attention, and a lack of intellectual discipline and analytical skills.It's bursts of noun phrases, self-interruptions, sudden departures from the theme, flashes of memory, odd side remarks. ... It's the disordered language of a person with a concentration problem." Pullum
Is this conversational, with gaps and pause, vague implications with a raised eyebrow of a shrug, that allow the listener to fill in the blanks, feel involved? People walk away from Trump feeling as though he were casually talking to them, allowing them to finish his thoughts.
The sentiments that resonate: fears of joblessness, worries about the United States losing its status as a major world power, concerns about foreign terrorist organizations. Trump validates their insecurities and justifies their anger. He connects on an emotional level
Content
In English: Trump believes he is smart, as his uncle was smart, and he possesses the credentials to back up that claim. If he were a liberal, he thinks, “they” — i.e., the biased liberal media — would give credence to his intelligence, and would trust his views on nuclear power. As it is, the Iranians (and the Persians, whoever they are) are out-negotiating us — a truth he can perceive because of his intelligence.
Trump uses fewer characters per word, fewer syllables per word, and shorter sentences than all the other candidates.
Hypotheses/Discussion
Messages designed to be more easily understood by citizens in the lower educational (economic?) strata
Candidates want to seem more real and accessible, not etherial and abstract
The style of communication has changed - 141 character Twitter messages; 10 second sound bites -- "There's no time to explain in modern politics" Elvin Lim, Political Scientist, Wesleyan University
Communicating a message can be more successful with simpler language; complex structures can obfuscate and confuse. MLK's I have a dream" speech is syntactically very simple.
Demonstration: Analysis of a 1-minute answer to the Question: Is it wrong to discriminate against people based on their religion?
http://digg.com/video/donald-trump-linguistics-answer-question
III. Lakoff's Principles of Cognitive Mechanisms for Cognitive Influence- taking advantage of natural brain mechanisms.
1. Repetition. Words are neurally linked to the circuits the determine their meaning. The more a word is heard, the more the circuit is activated and the stronger it gets, and so the easier it is to fire again. Trump repeats. Win. Win, Win. We’re gonna win so much you’ll get tired of winning.
2. Framing: Crooked Hillary. Framing Hillary as purposely and knowingly committing crimes for her own benefit, which is what a crook does. Repeating makes many people unconsciously think of her that way, even though she has been found to have been honest and legal by thorough studies by the right-wing Bengazi committee (which found nothing) and the FBI (which found nothing to charge her with, except missing the mark ‘(C)’ in the body of 3 out of 110,000 emails). Yet the framing is working.
Since virtually everything Hillary Clinton has ever done has violated Strict Father Morality, that makes her immoral. The metaphor thus makes her actions immoral, and hence she is a crook. The chant “Lock her up!” activates this whole line of reasoning.
3. Using Well-known examples: When a well-publicized disaster happens, the coverage activates the framing of it over and over, strengthening it, and increasing the probability that the framing will occur easily with high probability. Repeating examples of shootings by Muslims, African-Americans, and Latinos raises fears that it could happen to you and your community — despite the minuscule actual probability. Trump uses this to create fear. Fear tends to activate desire for a strong strict father — namely, Trump.
4. Association: Radical Islamic terrorists: “Radical” puts Muslims on a linear scale and “terrorists” imposes a frame on the scale, suggesting that terrorism is built into the religion itself. The grammar suggests that there is something about Islam that has terrorism inherent in it. Imagine calling the Charleston gunman a “radical Republican terrorist.”
5. Conventional metaphorical thought is inherent in our largely unconscious thought. Such normal modes of metaphorical thinking that are not noticed as such.
Consider Brexit, which used the metaphor of “entering” and “leaving” the EU. There is a universal metaphor that states are locations in space: you can enter a state, be deep in some state, and come out that state. If you enter a café and then leave the café , you will be in the same location as before you entered. But that need not be true of states of being. But that was the metaphor used with Brexit; Britons believe that after leaving the EU, things would be as before when the entered the EU. They were wrong. Things changed radically while they were in the EU. That same metaphor is being used by Trump: Make America Great Again. Make America Safe Again. And so on. As if there was some past ideal state that we can go back to just by electing Trump.
IV Sentence Diagramming
Trump comment on the Iran nuclear deal during a campaign rally in South Carolina on July 21, 2015.
This apparent incoherence has two main causes: false starts and parentheticals. Both are effectively signaled in speaking — by prosody along with gesture, posture, and gaze — and therefore largely factored out by listeners. But in textual form the cues are gone, and we lose the thread.
Hypotaxis: embedding clauses within clauses.
Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, okay, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart — you know, if you’re a conservative Republican, if I were a liberal, if, like, okay, if I ran as a liberal Democrat, they would say I'm one of the smartest people anywhere in the world — it’s true! — but when you're a conservative Republican they try — oh, do they do a number — that’s why I always start off: Went to Wharton, was a good student, went there, went there, did this, built a fortune — you know I have to give my like credentials all the time, because we’re a little disadvantaged — but you look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me — it would have been so easy, and it’s not as important as these lives are (nuclear is powerful; my uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power and that was 35 years ago; he would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right — who would have thought?), but when you look at what's going on with the four prisoners — now it used to be three, now it’s four — but when it was three and even now, I would have said it's all in the messenger; fellas, and it is fellas because, you know, they don't, they haven’t figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so, you know, it’s gonna take them about another 150 years — but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12423688/donald-trump-speech-style-explained-by-linguists Trump lie video
Innauguration speech.
The US is a mess; unemployment and crime are at record highs; your past presidents have failed you. I, Donald Trump, will fix everything.
At the CIA- tremendous lack of focus on context. At the fallen stars display, he just went on to say how the CIA made mistakes and he will fix everything.
References
Videos-
Excellent analysis of a 1-minute answer to the Question: Is it wrong to discriminate against people based on their religion?
http://digg.com/video/donald-trump-linguistics-answer-question
Video on Lying -
https://www.msn.com/en-ae/video/watch/donald-trump-hates-lies-but-cant-tell-the-truth/vp-BBw6fOw
Web articles, largely by linguists on Trump's speech
http://www.vox.com/2016/8/18/12423688/donald-trump-speech-style-explained-by-linguists
https://georgelakoff.com/2016/07/23/understanding-trump-2/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/understanding-trumps-use-_b_11675280.html
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/10/trump-feminine-speaking-style-214391
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/08/07/diagramming-trump-2/
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