32.2415, Review: Sociolinguistics: McIntosh, Mendoza-Denton (2020)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2415. Sat Jul 17 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2415, Review: Sociolinguistics: McIntosh, Mendoza-Denton (2020)

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Date: Sat, 17 Jul 2021 20:01:20
From: Elizabeth Craig [betsycraig at yahoo.com]
Subject: Language in the Trump Era

 
Discuss this message:
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/31/31-2790.html

EDITOR: Janet  McIntosh
EDITOR: Norma  Mendoza-Denton
TITLE: Language in the Trump Era
SUBTITLE: Scandals and Emergencies
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2020

REVIEWER: Elizabeth (Betsy) Craig, University of Georgia

SUMMARY

This volume constitutes a timely analysis of how Donald Trump’s distinctive
political discourse has brought about a flood of emotionally charged and
polarizing issues in the political landscape over the past five years in
America. No doubt his singular idiolect helped bring him to power and has
permeated American culture with a proliferation of catchy phrases, such as
“fake news” (a phrase actually originating with Hillary Clinton) and “believe
me.” In her detailed introduction to the entire text, Janet McIntosh
references Trump’s discourse style, which she calls “blustering” and deems a
“linguistic emergency” because, in her view, his proclamations have been so
full of declaratives simply contradictory to reality. She believes that in the
political arena we can no longer “expect words to pin down meaning,” but
rather to stir emotion: the Trumpian monologue values language most for its
“reality-generating properties,” and repetition is key. She submits Twitter as
the perfect platform for Trump because of its text limit in combination with
his lack of ability to substantiate or elaborate on any of his claims. He
ultimately “conveys attitude more than content.”

This text serves as a collection of what a group of (for the most part)
sociocultural anthropologists (and the students of one) have to say about the
peculiarity of Trump’s linguistic tokens, which have led to a series of events
of catastrophic consequence, indeed as a credible threat to democracy itself,
hence, the subtitle of this volume. McIntosh begins by explaining that the
social phenomenon of Trumpism was somewhat inevitable given 1) the reaction
from the right against the growing PC culture of the left, 2) the lingering
anger inspired by having elected our first African-American President, and 3)
the exponential growth in access to digital technology, especially in the
arena of popular media, to aid in the dispersal of an imagined reality. She
sets the historical stage for how Trump was not only possible, but probable,
to emerge from the modern-day perceived minority status of white, male
Americans, having felt increasingly victimized by women, feminists, people of
color, and, in particular, by Muslim and Latin American citizens and
immigrants.

The text is divided into four thematic units on divisiveness,
performance/lying, interaction, and patriotism, respectively, with a brief
introduction to each provided by one of the two editors. Transcriptions appear
in some chapters, where the dialogue is particularly enlightening of a
particular speech event. Some graphs, pictures, and charts are interspersed,
for example, to illustrate the frequency of a particular phrase over time in
Google searches, to visually depict some of Trump’s communicative gestures,
and to clarify the alignment of his discursive strategies with other (Latin
American) political figures. An index of key terms, events, and persons
mentioned in the text is appended for those interested in finding discussions
of specific topics such as “collusion” or “Nazi Germany.” References and
copious notes appear at the end of each chapter.

Part I. Dividing the American Public

Norma Mendoza-Denton (University of California, Los Angeles) provides an
introduction to this section focused on how Trump’s speech exposes him as
possibly the most divisive U.S. President in history. She observes that
Trump’s habitual use of the definite article in designating groups of people
(“the gays,” “the blacks,” etc.) serves to alienate the members of those
groups and to place himself distinctly outside of them as a white,
heterosexual male; this process is labeled “othering.”

James Slotta (University of Texas, Austin) discusses the significance of
Trump’s apparent incoherence to the fragmentation of U.S. culture. While
Trump’s speech may seem at times inscrutable to his deterrents, Slotta
maintains that his random strings of noun phrases and lack of complex syntax
serve as code to his fans, who feel he speaks directly to them with his more
implied, underlying intentions (a prosodic wink, if you will). Slotta believes
that his rather informal speaking style lends credence to his persona as
“authentic, relatable, and trustworthy” for his fans.

Jack Sidnell (University of Toronto), an authority on conversation analysis,
delves into Trump’s propensity for three-word catchphrases as highlighted here
with “Get ‘em out!” when referring to his detractors and protestors at various
speeches. Sidnell links Trump’s apparent sea change in attitude (from
initially tolerating his hecklers in the interest of free speech to calling
for their immediate removal from rally audiences) to the Black Lives Matter
incident in Seattle of August, 2015, where Bernie Sanders allowed fellow
demonstrators to commandeer his microphone. This particular refrain started
early in the presidential campaign when Trump sensed that Sanders was his
strongest rival and wanted to make sure that he was viewed, in contrast to
Sanders, as a pillar of masculinity. This common “battle cry” was eventually
expanded to refer to Trump’s stance on all immigrants, whether legal or not,
and his intentions to “drain the swamp” in Washington. Sidnell also notes his
excessive use of first-person, plural pronouns (‘we, us, our, ours’) as he
rallied his minions.

Janet McIntosh (Brandeis University) compares Trump fans to drill sergeants,
who belittle their cadets with shouting and name-calling, when he uses labels
like ‘crybabies’ and ‘snowflakes’ as insults toward the empathic left. She
sees such behavior as a reaction against the growth of PC culture on the left
and portrays such language use as “social action” that serves to establish a
powerful stance, not allowing for response, and to ridicule the target (the
radical left) as overly sensitive and unworthy of engagement.

Part II. Performance and Falsehood

Mendoza-Denton introduces this section on Trump’s characteristic exaggeration
and showmanship; he views his every speech/tweet as a display meant to evoke
emotion with little regard for its veracity. His “ever-increasing tenuous
relationship to truth” yields a parlance full of superlatives and exaggeration
as Trump uses hyperbole extensively to entertain through a combination of
nicknaming and mimicking; she demonstrates how Trump understands and exploits
the American obsession with performance.

Donna Goldstein, Kira Hall (both from University of Colorado, Boulder), and
Matthew Ingram (Dakota State University) focus on Trump’s “mocking gestural
imitations of vulnerable groups,” such as the disabled. These authors claim
that Trump’s entertaining body language is a facet of his personality that
makes him appealing to everyone: his gestures equal comedy, their vulgarity
contributing to the shock value. He is not viewed as a politician essentially,
but as a more real, more honest, more “one-of-us” kind of guy. They conclude
that his comedic reenactments bring not only his proponents back for more.

Marco Jacquemet (University of San Francisco) contends that Trump has little
interest in conveying factual information; according to Jacquemet, he is much
more interested in simply garnering attention and boosting his image. Dubbed
the ultimate “bullshit artist,” Trump, in his propensity for making false
claims, is singularly focused on managing his image rather than on
disseminating information. Jacquemet invokes Grice’s four maxims of the
Cooperative Principle of discourse (to be informative, truthful, relevant, and
clear) through which to analyze Trump’s flouting of these conversational
expectations. By focusing on his style rather than on any regard for facts,
Jacquemet claims, Trump draws in his audience, who perceive him to be
authentic and without fault, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Adam Hodges (University of Colorado, Boulder) examines three instances of
Trump’s exploitation of “plausible deniability,” a common practice among
politicians, but one which this President uses to the extreme: asking/implying
that former FBI Director James Comey “go easy” on Michael Flynn, commenting
favorably on the participants (“both sides”) in the supremacist riots in
Charlottesville, and denying Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S.
Presidential election. According to Hodge, he disavows his own past statements
with decontextualized interpretations to focus on the literal, innocent
meaning, while denying their obvious underlying implications. Hodges
characterizes Trump’s rhetoric as a propensity for gaslighting, because he
insists that what he meant to convey by past falsehoods was innocuous.

Part III. The Interactive Making of the Trumpian World

Janet McIntosh asserts that going along with the President, whether through
silence or lack of criticism, constitutes collusion. She submits that
“reality,” be it true or false, is a co-constructed concept; the making of
meaning is a joint process among interlocutors. The chapters in this section
elaborate on that cooperative creation of facts.

Deborah Cameron (University of Oxford) explores the sociolinguistic concept of
“banter,” which is how Trump dismissed his subjugation of women in his “Grab
‘em by the pussy” comment to Billy Bush in 2005 as recorded on the Access
Hollywood tape. She demonstrates how merely laughing at another’s joke is
collusion and recognizes it as a pervasive form of male boasting about female
conquest, which, as such, does not even have to be true. On the tape, Trump
conveys his strong sense of gender hierarchy through both male bonding and
intra-male dominance. Cameron views such talk as interactive performance, just
like a big-fish story, exemplifying male relationships. She contends that the
revelation of this vulgar recording turned into a positive rather than a
negative for Trump because more people then came to view him as genuine; she
posits authenticity as a large component of the Trump brand and a key reason
why he was able to defeat Hillary Clinton, who represented the status quo of
conventional, highly experienced, yet untrustworthy politicians.

Bruce Mannheim (University of Michigan) agrees that the exposure of the Access
Hollywood tape actually served to advance Trump’s appeal as it exemplifies a
very common social routine: the signaling of acquiescence through laughing at
an off-color joke told by an alpha-male. He demonstrates how Trump’s vulgar
reference to violence toward an intimate female body part both served the pack
mentality and situated Trump firmly at the top of it.

Carol Cohn (University of Massachusetts, Boston) likens Trump’s description of
his “nuclear button” as bigger and better than Kim Jung-un’s to
penis-measuring; he obviously “views the prospect of nuclear war as a kind of
phallic competition.” She focuses her discussion on the prevalent use of
sexual metaphor in descriptions of military weaponry through phrases such as
“cocked and loaded.” Such linguistic framing in the abstract serves to
construct mental representations of particular phenomena. She shows how
national security invokes gendered discourse and thereby primes our thoughts
into categories of masculine (good)/feminine (bad) with regard to the
consequences of nuclear holocaust.

Brion van Over (Manchester Community College) refers to Trump as the
“Evaluator in Chief” as he describes a typical conference-table routine that
occurred in February of 2017 with a group of his African-American supporters.
After each participant introduces themselves, Trump renders an appraisal of
their performance based solely on how each has benefitted and shown loyalty to
him in the past. As his evaluations after each self-introduction are
delivered, van Over contends that the participants are being informed as to
what they should include in their own introductions: exactly how and for how
long they have served Trump. In his own way, Trump makes each of their
introductions more about himself, whereas such meetings are traditionally
intended for supporters to describe their needs to the President.

Sylvia Sierra (Syracuse University) and Natasha Shrikant (University of
Colorado, Boulder) again address this strategic gathering of Trump’s
African-American supporters to deflect the notion that he is an anti-minority
racist. According to Sierra and Shrikant, the entire scene smacks of an
insincere presentation of alignment with African Americans in order to better
his own image. The authors contend that this meeting was called for damage
control, solely to make Trump appear that he had significant support from the
Black community. He primarily used the opportunity to rail against “fake news”
in an effort to induce feelings of comradery among the group. While such
“listening sessions” with a President had previously been used to hear about
the concerns of the participants and how the person in power proposed to help
them, Trump, they claim, manages to make it all about himself and invites the
attendees to commiserate about misrepresentations in the media, particularly
on the part of CNN. The authors submit that Trump’s allusions to his
victimization in the news are an effort to establish a perceived affinity with
this gathering of a historically maligned minority. By “adopting the identity
of political victim,” they claim, the most powerful white man in the world
succeeds in ignoring racial inequality altogether and in garnering sympathy
and support from this gathering of conservative, black “movers-and-shakers,”
whose issues are completely sidestepped.

Part IV. Language, White Nationalism and International Responses to Trump

McIntosh introduces this final section as about the white, authoritarian
racism and xenophobia implicit in Trumpspeak. Trump frequently uses Mock
Spanish to assert his symbolic dominance over that group of speakers, the
fastest growing demographic in the country. McIntosh offers these chapters to
demonstrate how Trump’s use of language reveals his underlying beliefs that
all Mexicans are criminals or rapists, all Muslims are terrorists, and all
sub-Saharan Africans are from “shithole” countries.

H. Samy Alim (University of California, Los Angeles) and Geneva Smitherman
(Michigan State University) focus on a key incident, in which Trump refers to
a border guard having “perfect English,” as a prime example of
“raciolinguistic exceptionalism.” Simply noting the absence of a stereotypical
trait in a person of color, they observe, advances the notion of white
supremacy, just like remarking on Barack Obama’s articulate speech, which is
unexpected because of stereotypes about Black English, a rich and legitimate
variety in its own right. Such linguistic ethnocentrism assumes that there is
one (superior) standard variety of American English to which all should
ascribe. Alim and Smitherman assert that by pointing out someone’s ethnicity
in this way, the President revealed his covert racism, while ironically
believing that he was demonstrating just the opposite.

Otto Santa Anna (University of California, Los Angeles) and a group of his
students, Marco Juárez, Magaly Reséndez, John Hernández, Oscar Gáytan,
Kimberly Cerón, Celeste Gómez, and Roberto Solíz, discuss how “the powerless''
are primed to fear immigrants through Trump’s frequent references to a
perceived rampant “invasion” taking place at our southern border. They compare
Trump’s anti-immigrant discourse to that of the Nazis in their campaign to rid
Germany of all Jews. In turn, the authors explain how Trump uses metaphors to
advance his cause: nation as border (wall), immigration as flood, Mexico as
enemy, immigrant as criminal/animal, white America as victim, and himself as
hero. 

Norma Mendoza-Denton explores how Trump aligns himself with the
ethnonationalism of Bolsonaro, the President of Brazil and ironically a member
of a minority group that Trump persistently disparages: Latinx. Here, Trump is
also compared to two other “populist messianic autocrats” of Latin America in
his ultimate desire to be viewed as the epitome of masculine authority. He is
shown not to hide his fondness for dictators: Putin, Erdogan, Kim, Bolsonaro,
etc., as each of their political narratives embodies their shared worldview of
authoritarianism.

Quentin Williams (University of the Western Cape) describes how Trump was
outed for besmirching sub-Saharan Africa as consisting of nothing but
“shithole” countries, thereby implying its people are little more than
detritus. Williams provides examples of Trump’s color-blind racism through the
linguistic vehicles of denial, equivocation, and racial projection.

Aomar Boum (University of California, Los Angeles) explains Trump’s dichotomy
of Muslim enemies, on the one hand, and rich Arab friends, on the other. Trump
bisects the Arab world into either wealthy friends or terrorists/refugees,
displaying an ignorance of history. His interest in the Arab world is
portrayed as purely from a business standpoint; Boum asserts that economic
benefits and the competition for oil in the region are what Trump cares about.
He provides a quantitative account of Trump’s mention of specific Arab
countries in his tweets in order to break down the patterning of comments
regarding particular Middle Eastern dignitaries and countries.

EVALUATION       

This text is written for anyone interested in socio-political discourse of the
21st century, but especially for the more general reader who may be confused
about how Trump did it, how his linguistic quirks could have led him to become
the most powerful man in the world despite all of the apparent incongruities.
In an in-depth analysis from various perspectives, the authors pick apart
exactly why Trump’s popularity is strongest among the demographic of
uneducated, rural, white males, who, it is claimed, may feel threatened by the
growth of any other segment of the population; his platform is portrayed as a
somewhat inevitable backlash against educated, urban liberals. The authors
zero in on how language can be used not only to convey information, but to
“reshape social relations.” They describe in assorted ways how Trump was able
to convince a substantial portion of the U.S. population to support him. His
uniquely quotidian jargon (for a politician) attracts a certain demographic in
large numbers. This work constitutes a meticulous analysis of the social
milieu that preceded Trump and made him possible. As repeatedly emphasized, a
good deal of his popularity is due to America’s addiction to celebrity, which
he achieves through the use of populist language: he says what people want to
hear with little regard for follow through. As some authors conclude, there is
a great deal of fear and anger emanating from the shrinking dominance of
white, male, (pseudo-)Christian rule in this country.

All of the chapters cohere well under each theme. However, in two instances we
read about the same phenomenon twice, such as in the two discussions of the
Access Hollywood tape and the two on the gathering of some of Trump’s
African-American supporters. I regard this text as more a sociological
commentary (about American society and Trump's effect on it) than linguistic
analysis, especially the second half of the book on collusion and white
nationalism. In fact, most of the 20 contributors are professors of
anthropology; only 4 of those are actual linguists, and some dwell in the
field of communications. I believe a more apt title would be “The Polarization
of America in Trump’s Wake.” I appreciate that the authors are from a wide
spectrum of universities both in the U.S. and abroad coming to the same
conclusions about how Trump became so popular and why Trump had to occur now.

The book also serves as a meticulous examination of truth and this
politician’s highly limited relationship to it as demonstrated in his speech
acts. I believe there is some as yet unexploited opportunity here to both
quantify and qualify the language of deceit, using Trump as the quintessential
example of deception through manipulation, albeit subconscious. Because so
much of Trump’s linguistic repertoire consists in the mere repetition of
vacuous over-generalizations, the reader/linguist may be interested in a more
quantitative analysis of his speech from the field of corpus linguistics,
which can be found in another recent volume edited by Schneider and Matthias
(2020) and referenced below. In a shorter work also listed below, Peter
Oborne, an expert on political lying, with Tom Roberts demonstrates how
Trump’s use of Twitter helped him win the Presidency and “how this fusion of
entertainment and cunningly crafted propaganda…destabilized the world's most
powerful democracy.” 

REFERENCES

Oborne, Peter & Tom Roberts. 2017. How Trump thinks: His tweets and the birth
of a new political language. London: Head of Zeus.

Schneider, Ulrike & Matthias Eitelmann (eds.). 2020. Linguistic inquiries into
Donald Trump’s language: From ‘fake news’ to ‘tremendous success.’ London:
Bloomsbury Academic.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Elizabeth Craig is a freelance editor and linguist-at-large with extensive
experience in teaching academic writing at institutions of higher education in
the U.S. and abroad. She holds a master’s degree in teaching English as a
second language from Georgia State University and a doctorate in linguistics
from the University of Georgia. Dr. Craig is particularly interested in how
corpus linguistics sheds light on word and part-of-speech frequencies to
distinguish various registers and topical domains.





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