Pragmatics of Arrogance in Trump's "America First" Foreign Policy Speech

Abstract

     Arrogance is a human psychological belief of being on the top of all things. This means that an arrogant person sees himself as the center around which others revolve. Pragmatically, arrogance can be seen in terms of language use, that is, an arrogant person likes to resort to certain pragmatic strategies to appear as a person who is superior to others. There is no limit to which pragmatic strategies arrogant people might rely on. Nevertheless, some of these strategies can be investigated in a certain illustrative example which can be culled from a certain context. It seems, as observed by this study, that this topic has not been given its scholarly pragmatic attention. To bridge this gap in the literature, a certain type of data can be scrutinized to discover the pragmatic aspects of arrogance in it. In this respect, the present study sets itself the task of pragmatically dealing with this particular issue. To attain this goal, this work attempts to answer the following question: What is the pragmatics of arrogance in Trump's "America First" foreign policy speech?  In association with this aim, it is hypothesized that Donald Trump uses certain pragmatic strategies which reveal his arrogant nature. In this regard, he is expected to employ commissure speech acts such as threats and promises, and exploit different types of devices to trigger presuppositions of various types. Besides, he appeals to some pragmatic functions of exaggeration.  In order to achieve the aim of the paper and verify or reject its hypothesis, an analytical pragmatic framework is developed to analyze the data under scrutiny. Additionally, a statistical method represented by the percentage equation is used to calculate the results. The most important finding arrived at by this study is that Donald Trump most often resorts to the strategies of promising and threatening. Furthermore, he uses presupposition triggers, and resorts to exaggeration through exploiting the devices of repetition and manipulation.