by Xmd5a | 2025-08-31 13:29:54+00:00
The focus on the oral aspect of language is in fact what helped linguistics become an autonomous discipline in Europe at the beginning of the previous century.

I think what bugs you in Trump's "speech" is that it looks like a one-sided conversation, and as such, features the kind of structure you'd in fact expect to find in a conversation:

┌ A: "Are you coming tonight?" │ ┌ B: "Can I bring someone with me?" │ │ ┌ A: "Boy or girl?" │ │ │ ┌ B: "What difference does it make?" │ │ │ └ A: "A question of balance." │ │ └ B: "A girl." │ └ A: "That works." └ B: "Alright, I'll come."

Found this in my copy of Kerbrat-Orecchioni's Les interactions verbales. A bit too heavy to be part of a dialogue in a book, you'd want to edit it, unless of course you're specifically looking for that refreshing touch of orality. And yet those "embbeded", "side sequences" of questions following questions are extremely frequent in everyday's speech. Moving beyond questions of theme (the micro-dependences between interventions in a conversation), the same kind of structures can be shown to exist at a higher level, that of conversation topics (the semantic content of the whole conversation, not the micro-negotiation for requesting clarification for instance): they are not neatly arranged in a hierarchy, can be intertwined, have very long dependence relationships (e.g. "Talking about [this topic we were discussing one hour ago]..."), etc...

So the git structure is not what is problematic with Trump's speech, it is in fact in line with the findings of conversational linguistics. But there is something beyond the mere inadequacy between the format and the role of president.

The conversational yet monologic nature of his speech, the total lack of transition markers, the constant violation of relevance continuity, the parasitic asides for his ennemies, down to the explicit:

>"You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I'll talk about, like, nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together."

indicate that the needle that ties everything together is himself. Here's the conduct of topical continuity in his speech, the sole coherence point. Illness or strategy ?

https://www.unige.ch/clf/fichiers/pdf/10-Berthoud_nclf17.pdf

Topic management, enunciative processes, and conversational sequences

[...]

Indeed, these processes do not concern only the speaking subject: the topic is expressed for a listener, and its formulation is oriented toward them. In speaking, the speaker immediately positions a recipient in front of them, who becomes a co-speaker (Culioli 1985) and thus directly participates in this construction. From this perspective, the development of the topic depends on the reciprocity of enunciative perspectives, which manifests and materializes in interaction, where the topic does not belong to a single speaker but is collectively constructed, thereby constituting an activity of co-enunciation.

[...]

The participants are sensitive to the question, “Why this, now, addressed to me?” which notably arises when transitions, introductions, or topic recycling cannot be described and analyzed as such. The first analysts of the topic and conversation are therefore the speakers themselves:

1 Roger: I'm gonna blackmail you 2 Al: fuck you 3 Ken: hhh 4 Roger: better not I become pregnant easy hch // hch heh hhhhh 5 Louise: heh hch hehhhh take birth control pills 6 Roger: hehh heh 7 Al: hey Isaw// saw airai neat//joke 8 Ken: the Utile green pills? 9 Al: I went down to the Ports O'Call Village, not to be changing the subject but she brought it up 10 Roger: Not to be change- "I wouldn't change the subject" 11 Al: but where was a birth con- they had a joke shop with a birth control pill and it was made out of styrofoam. put it between you lee- legs'n press very hard 12 Louise: hch hhhhh 13 Al: heh heh heh (Sacks, 1992, 1:539)

In this example, taken from a transcription of a therapeutic session for adolescents cited by Sacks, Al initiates a new topic in line 7 by linking it to an earlier element mentioned by Louise in line 5. In this way, he uses line 5 as a topical source for his joke, treating “birth control pills” as a previous topic. However, it appears that “birth control pills” is not considered a topic by the participants, which motivates the explicit marking with the phrase “not to change the subject.” What emerges here is the collective production and interpretation of the topic across sequences, which governs what can be described (“accountable”) as a transition, a change, or even a topic abandonment. It is not enough to establish virtual links with preceding elements; these links must also be recognizable and treated as appropriate by the interlocutors—something that an approach focusing on sequential markings must take into account (Mondada, 1995b).