Evaluative language in the idiolect of Donald Trump in the context of the 2020 US presidential election

This bachelor thesis aims to determine to what degree evaluative language is employed by Donald Trump in speeches made regarding the 2020 US presidential election. The objective of this work is to determine whether positive or negative evaluation is more prevalent while addressing the election. Trump's characteristic use of intensification and repetition will also be investigated in relation to the evaluation of the election. The theoretical part will introduce evaluative language on the background of Martin and White's Appraisal theory, which will later be used as a framework for analysis. Several characteristic features of Trump's language will be introduced and afterwards, the link between manipulation in rhetoric and evaluative language will be discussed. A corpus of Trump's post-election speeches will be compiled for the purposes of the analysis. The analysis will be conducted using the online corpus manager Sketch Engine. After generating a list of the corpus' most frequent tokens, those with an inherent semantic relevance to the topic of elections will be selected. Their most frequent collocates will then be searched for uses of evaluative language, focusing specifically on the adjectival and adverbial collocates, which typically express evaluative meaning. The results will be interpreted..