From election to insurrection : A Speech Act Theory study of Donald Trump’s tweets in the wake of the 2020 election.

Sammanfattning: This essay utilizes Speech Act Theory to assess Donald Trump’s role in inciting the riot that took place in Washington D.C. on the 6th of January, 2021 and culminated with the attack on the Capitol building. For the purposes of the study a corpus was created with tweets collected from the Trump Twitter Archive. The tweets cover the span between the latest presidential election, on the 3rd of November, 2020, to the day of the attack. The corpus was read manually and sorted into themes. The themes that emerged show that: a) Trump was convinced of his victory, b) felt that the election was rigged, c) accused news networks, the Democrats and even prominent Republicans for his loss, and d) called the people for action. A quantitative method that identified the most common words in the corpus corroborated the identification of the described themes. The themes were compared to Speech Act Theory’s felicitous conditions for directive speech acts. The study found that Trump’s tweets satisfy the conditions for the successful directive speech acts of Order and Command, thus providing grounds to make the case that he was responsible for inciting the attack.