A Corpus Assisted Comparative Analysis of Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s Speeches during the 2016 Presidential Election

1 Introduction Political language is something that concerns everyone and is the emblematic example of the use of language with a persuasive purpose. It is a reality to which we are constantly confronted, on which everyone has prejudices and that everyone questions. In 2016, the world experienced the unfolding of a historic election in the United States, an election that would take either the first female president into the White House, or a president who had no previous public office experience and who repeatedly broke canonic political norms. Donald Trump's ultimate victory over Hillary Clinton vanquished all popular perceptions and shocked the whole world. Generally regarded as the most striking election result in modern U.S. history, Trump's victory sent people seeking out for answers and explanations in all sectors of society. In an effort to better understand Trump's vocabulary and his attitude, the main characteristics of his rhetoric have been the subject of many discourse studies. Obviously, most of these inquiries take Trump as the main subject of investigation, assuming that his rhetoric reflects a deviation from existing norms and therefore worthy of special investigation. This inevitably pushes studies on his rivals to the periphery of academic consideration, thus failing to highlight their specific differences. This work aims to investigate, from the linguistic-argumentative point of view, the discursive production of both the candidates Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the context of the American Presidential Elections, accentuating their campaign themes, and exploring their underlying political beliefs. This objective will be pursued through the analysis of two distinct corpora, each one containing the speeches given by each candidate over the period of the campaign events, with a particular textual analysis software. Computational analysis’ tools, introduced by Sinclair and Partington, are combined with the tools of argumentative linguistics and of the Critical Discourse Analysis, in order to thoroughly investigate the communicative methods and the main differences of the subjects examined.