A Critical Discourse Analysis of Rumour in Donald Trump’s Tweets

Abstract

Discourse is one of the crucial tools that mediates between powerful ideologies, oppresses people to target social struggles, and it is a powerful institution that plays a role essential in the production and maintenance of unequal social relations. This study adopts the socio-cognitive framework of Van Dijk which is one of the main approaches of the Critical Analysis of discourse, insofar as it unveils the ideological and powerful relations that exist in the political discourse and rumour. It aims to analyze eleven controversial tweets from Donald Trump dealing with multiple social topics; the analysis was based on the two dimensions of the first macro and micro structural analysis approach. The overall results reveal that the political discourse in Van Dijk's dimensions actually involves the use of rumors conveyed in a smooth style and simple language, to seem more believable in order to convince the public and to have an impact on their opinions. Finally, we recommend for studies later that this research helps to better understand one of the critical and most questioned, the socio-cognitive approach of Van Dijk, to analyze and interpret the implicit in the rumor since the nature of the latter is very complicated.