A Socio-Pragmatic Study of Verbal Abuse in Selected American Political Debates

Abstract

Verbal abuse is a significant strategy in American political debates. Presidential candidates use a variety of strategies to accomplish their intentions. Accordingly, there is a need to shed light on the usage of verbal abuse from a pragmatic perspective. However, this study verbal analyzes 2020 of four debates, two for Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Furthermore, the main aim of this study is investigating the employment of socio-pragmatic strategies, which are represented by speech act and impoliteness strategies, play a clear role to investigate the functions of verbal abuse. Investigate the most dominant of pragmatic aspect as well as the most dominant category of verbal abuse. It is hypothesized that the socio-pragmatic strategies has a clear role in the contexts of presidential debates even to show the functions of each form, impoliteness is an example of socio-pragmatic strategies has the main role in the context of political debates, undermining is the most frequent form of verbal abuse that can be used in the American political debates. The findings of the analysis have shown that pragmatics aspects such as speech act and impoliteness can be used to actualize the verbal abuse. It is observed that such strategy utilized by the American presidents in the contexts of debate which is taken as pragmatic perspective. Speech act has the main role in these debates. Moreover, The most frequent category of verbal abuse which is found with these debates is name calling.