A corpus-assisted analysis of framing strategies in Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign speeches

In political competition, campaign speech becomes one of the main aspects that receives public attention because it shapes image and influences public reception of a political actor. Previous research has focused on patterns of positive aspect use in the victory factors of political actors, yet attention to the influence of the combination of positive and negative aspects remains limited. This study aims to analyze the use of evaluative adjectives in Trump's campaign speeches in the 2024 US Presidential Election to reveal how he frames himself and his opponents. The significance of this study lies in the field of linguistics by enriching framing analysis and corpus linguistics research, as well as for the public by enhancing their ability to understand messages more critically in a political context. This study applies a corpus-based mixed method. The quantitative approach is conducted through corpus analysis to identify adjectives in Trump’s 2024 campaign speeches. The quantitative results are then analyzed qualitatively by means of the four analytical devices of Entman’s framing model. This study attempts to reveal Trump’s framing of both himself and his political opponents. The data collection technique used in this study is documentation. The findings show that Trump uses evaluative adjectives to build a self-representation as a figure who is capable of improvement for US condition. Other adjectives are used to frame political opponents as obstructive parties. There are eight evaluative adjectives for each of the self-frame and opponent frame. This study concludes that the use of evaluative language is an effective rhetorical strategy for politicians to attract voter support and influence public perception in the context of political campaigns in the 2024 US Presidential Election.