Understatement in Donald Trump’s Selected Speeches on COVID-19
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Abstract
This study intends to investigate the ways in which news agencies and writers overstate the risk posed by COVID-19 through the use of a linguistic strategy: understatement. The President of the United States of America, Donald Trump, will be the primary focus of this research project. The scope of this data is limited to a random selection of two speeches downloaded from YouTube by President Donald Trump. In light of this, the primary objective of this research is to provide a response to the following question: (1) Which linguistic strategies does Trump employ in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic?(2) Which linguistic and rhetorical tools does he use the most frequently when employing this linguistic tactic?(3) What functions are performed in addition to using understatement in his speech?
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