Prosodic cues and pragmatic inference in populist political speech: A case study of Donald Trump’s rallies

Vollständiger Abstract

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This article examines how selected prosodic cues in Donald Trump’s campaign rallies guide audience inference in populist political performance. Rather than offering a corpus-wide account, it presents a discourse-pragmatic case study of four focal extracts drawn from a larger dataset of 10 campaign rallies from the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections. Combining time-aligned transcription with Praat-based inspection of F0, intensity, duration, and pause structure, the study analyzes how local prosodic patterning contributes to contrastive framing, audience uptake, and affective alignment in live rally settings. The findings show that pitch movement where recoverable, durational marking, pacing, and strategic pausing do not encode ideological meanings in themselves; rather, they make particular interpretations more accessible in context, including antagonistic contrast, ridicule, collective alignment, and crisis escalation. By situating the analysis at the intersection of discourse pragmatics and socioprosodics, the article argues that prosody is not merely ornamental in populist rallies but part of the interactional organization through which speaker and crowd co-construct political meaning. The study contributes a more empirically bounded account of how vocal form shapes inference in mediatized political performance.