A Critical Stylistic Study of Modality in Selected Tweets of the Former American President Donald Trump

Academic Paper from the year 2023 in the subject Politics - Region: USA, University of Babylon (Ministry of Education, Iraq), language: English, abstract: This paper is an attempt to explore modality used by the Former U.S. President Donald Trump in his tweets to indicate his political and ideological intentions and goals during (2020), because it is the last year of Trump's Presidency; and it is the year that the American elections held, and within this year Covid-19 swept the world. The critical stylistic analysis aims at uncovering Trump's ideological outlook by identifying the extra layer of meaning in which the ideological evaluation is structured and exposing the way in which the resources of language are strategically deployed to influence and ideologically manipulate Trump's followers' experience of reality. One of Jeffries's (2010) tools which is 'hypothesizing' used in analyzing modality in critical stylistics, and she also proposes some constructions that give modal meaning such as (lexical verbs, modal adjectives, modal adverbs and conditional structure), in addition to Simpson's (1993) four categories (deontic, boulomaic, epistemic and perception).