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Interpretive challenges with American presidential discourse described as joking

  • Catherine Evans Davies

    Catherine Evans Davies earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from UC Berkeley. She is a professor emerita of linguistics who served for 30 years in the English department at the University of Alabama prior to her retirement in 2019.

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Published/Copyright: April 20, 2022

Abstract

When an American president speaks in a way that is later characterized as joking/kidding, a wide range of interpretations become possible. At a minimum, there are two basic interpretations: serious and non-serious. At the other extreme, there may be as many nuanced interpretations as there are audiences for the discourse. This study examines the “just/only joking” strategy outside of the face-to-face context and how it has been enacted in relation to presidential discourse. Using as data three prototypical examples for which public interpretations were available, the study explores how the two main audiences (currently polarized political groupings in the United States) tend to interpret the “joking” in relation to the performance style of former President Donald J. Trump either as a harmless joke or as a grave threat.


Corresponding author: Catherine Evans Davies, Professor Emerita of Linguistics, Department of English, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL, USA, E-mail:

About the author

Catherine Evans Davies

Catherine Evans Davies earned her Ph.D. in linguistics from UC Berkeley. She is a professor emerita of linguistics who served for 30 years in the English department at the University of Alabama prior to her retirement in 2019.

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this paper was published in Russian in 2021 in a special issue on “Any Media… is hilarious” of the journal Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies 3/3: 296–320 (https://doi.org/10.46539/gmd.v3i3). This updated English version is published in HUMOR by kind permission of the editors of Galactica Media, Sergey A. Troitskiy and Rastyam T. Aliev.

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Received: 2021-09-29
Accepted: 2021-12-30
Published Online: 2022-04-20
Published in Print: 2022-05-25

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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