A Sociopragmatic Study of Taunt in Trump's Political Tweets

Abstract

Taunt is defined as an intended words that involve humiliating, cruel, demeaning, or bigoted language thinly disguised as jokes. Additionally, it includes laughter directed at the taunted, not with the taunted. It also induces fear of further taunting or can be a prelude to physical bullying and sinister in motive. The current study is concerned with identifying and analysing taunt in Donald Trump's political tweets on sociopragmatic level. This study aims at identifying the functions of taunt, the purposes of taunt, the social variables of taunt, the speech acts of expression and which type is heavily used by Trump. The analysis is curried out on data consist of four tweets from the official account of Trump on Twitter during the period of 2020 election. The study concludes that the verbal mode of taunt is used in most of the times. The  speech act of criticizing is widely used in Trump's tweets. Taunt is used by Trump to fulfill the functions of insult, attack and provoke  and sometimes to mock and laugh at the target. The most achieved ends by Trump's Tweets are defamation, humiliation, irritation, and challenge the targets.