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This study aims at problematizing President Trump's argumentation in response to the protesters' demands for justice, racial equality and police reforms over the killing of George Floyd. In his first reaction, Trump used mild rhetoric that frustrated and galvanized the angry mobs. In response to escalating protests, Trump escalated his own rhetoric. Calling into question the character and credibility of the protesters, Trump labelled the protesters "thugs" and "terrorists", alluded to the deployment of the Military, and tweeted "when the looting starts, the shooting starts". Pragma-dialectical analysis of Trumps' response reveals that rational argumentation yields to derailed strategic maneuvering involving name-giving, ad baculum and ad hominem fallacies. Trump makes a dialectical shift from persuasive logic to fear arousing and threat making tactics in order to coercively hold up demonstrations and enforce compliance, and later shifts from persuasion to eristic discourse. He politicizes his response by accusing the media of fomenting hatred and anarchy, and by blaming the mayhem on his democratic rival, who is ridiculed and personally abused. These are irrelevant argumentative moves in the socio-political context as well as in the context of the persuasion discourse.

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Donald Trump's use of Twitter as a modality to defame opponents, antagonize media outlets and even glorify violence is an enduring legacy for political campaigns, presidential rhetoric and argumentative debates. This nontraditional use of social media as a political communication tool has invited Twitter's fact-checking editorial decisions, alienated some of Trump's supporters and attracted worldwide criticism. Using purposive sampling, the present paper employs the ten textual-conceptual functions of critical stylistics to analyze a dataset of Trump's tweets on domestic and international political issues published between 2011 and 2020 and assembled from the monitor corpus Trump Twitter Archive. The critical stylistic analysis aims at uncovering Trump's ideological outlook by identifying the extra layer of meaning in which the ideological evaluation is structured and exposing the way in which the resources of language are strategically deployed to influence and ideologically manipulate Trump's followers' experience of reality. Analysis reveals a network of lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic choices underlying Trump's seemingly simple rhetoric. It signposts his ideological evaluation and constructs a world for his followers to desire, believe or fear. The study extends the application of critical stylistics to microblogging channels, with implications both for the linguistic make-up of political communication in Web 2.0 contexts and for the explanatory power of critical stylistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poetry offers a "rich, varied repertoire and a source for much enjoyment for teacher and learner alike" (Collie and Slater, 1987, p. 226). In primary classes, poetry can be exploited to facilitate the learning of language and prepare students for the subsequent encounters with literature at later stages of their education. These benefits can be obtained only with judicious text selections and pedagogical decisions, or else the introduction of poetry at this early stage of education may defeat its purpose and generate aversion to poetry. This paper proposes a language-based approach to poetry for use with high-level primary students in English-medium schools. In order to demonstrate the arguments, the researcher proposes a lesson plan based on a stylistic analysis of a poem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]