Corpus Driven Critical Discourse Analysis of 2020 Presidential Election Campaign Tweets of Donald Trump and Joe Biden

Abstract

Twitter as a tool for opinion-making, building repertoire, and winning fame has achieved its maximum use and influence especially by coming under the fingertips of the politicians. Its socio-political impact can easily be gauged by examining its role in various social and political situations. However, the role of social media tools especially Twitter has become very crucial and decisive in electoral campaigns all over the world in general and US presidential elections in particular. The social media wings, supporters of the political parties, hired companies, and the candidates themselves become very active users of the innovative use of Twitter for campaigning to win elections (Ferrara, Chang, Chen, Muric & Patel, 2020). The current study intends to explore concurrent themes/issues highlighted in tweets of Donald Trump and Joe Biden made during the 2020 presidential election campaign in the USA. Only the written tweets from September 02, 2020, to November 17, 2020, were collected for the analysis. Corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis as two methodological strands for data analysis and interpretations were used as analytical and theoretical frameworks respectively. These two strands were used to identify the discursive practices related to the construction and propagation of the political ideologies owned by Donald Trump and Joe Biden. The concordances of the six most frequent words were generated and analyzed in order to identify the most unique themes/issues to the election campaign. These themes include ideological stands of both candidates on Covid-19 policies, environmental issues, racial unrest, and othering each other.