This study explores how U.S. President Donald Trump employs Twitter as a strategic instrument of power politics to disseminate his right-wing populist discourse. Applying the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis, this article analyzes the meaning and function of Trump’s discursive strategies on Twitter. The data consists of over 200 tweets collected from his personal account between his inauguration on January 20, 2017 and his first address to Congress on February 28, 2017. The findings show how Trump uses an informal, direct, and provoking communication style to construct and reinforce the concept of a homogeneous people and a homeland threatened by the dangerous other. Moreover, Trump employs positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation to further his agenda via social media. This study demonstrates how his top-down use of Twitter may lead to the normalization of right-wing populist discourses, and thus aims to contribute to the understanding of right-wing populist discourse online.

In this study, I examine the online discourse of the European refugee crisis on the micro-blogging platform, Twitter. Specifically, I analyze 100 tweets that include #refugeesnotwelcome, and explore how this hashtag is used to express negative feelings, beliefs and ideologies toward refugees and (im)migrants in Europe. Guided by critical discourse studies, I focus on Twitter users’ discursive strategies as well as form and function of semiotic resources and multimodality. Twitter users who include this particular hashtag use a rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion to depict refugees as unwanted, criminal outsiders. These tendencies align with current trends in Europe where nationalist-conservative and xenophobic right-wing groups gain power and establish a socially accepted discourse of racism.

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Pragmatics and discourse analysis are two distinct, yet interrelated, fields of study that both encompass a wide range of research approaches and perspectives. While pragmatics began as a domain of formal linguistics concerned with meaning at the utterance level, over the past three decades, the scope of pragmatics research has shifted to focus on meaning in larger stretches of discourse. Moreover, the scope of context considered in the interpretation of situated meanings has expanded in contemporary discursive pragmatics research, with much of this socially oriented scholarship absorbing influences from adjacent disciplines. Currently, multimodal approaches to discourse analysis (MDA) are growing in influence in pragmatics research because of their potential to account for meaning‐making systems that extend beyond the linguistic. This entry provides a brief historical overview outlining the relationship between pragmatics and discourse analysis, discusses several of the dominant theoretical influences on discursive approaches to pragmatics, and presents some of the major characteristics of empirical work on discursive pragmatics.