ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates several discourse marking strategies related to Donald Trump's idiosyncratic style of public speaking in debate and formal speech contexts. It provides some background on the analysis of sociolinguistic style in public discourse. The chapter discusses these elements in the following order: the use of turn-initial "well" as a preface to refocus responses to questions in dialogic contexts, the use of "by the way" as a turn-medial marker of topic change, the use of the phrase "believe me", and other forms of epistrophic punctuation. It considers several distinctive types of discourse-marking devices related to Donald Trump's style that are argued to perform several functions and contributes to the construction of his political identity in the 2015–2016 presidential primary season. Discourse markers (DMs) are one such feature that plays an important role, and they have multiple functions at various planes of discourse. The chapter describes the corpus of data selected for analysis.
