L’empreinte du locuteur : subjectivation progressive du discours présidentiel de Donald Trump

We examine the semantic evolution of Donald Trump’s presidential speeches during his first term (2017-2021), using quantitative methods from corpus linguistics and natural language processing. Our corpus includes all transcribed official speeches, segmented into homogeneous speech units and then analyzed using word embeddings. Two scales of evolution are considered: an external dynamic, measured at the level of the presidency, and an internal dynamic, observed within each speech. The external analysis does not reveal a large semantic shift over time, suggesting relative stability in the presidential register. On the other hand, a clear internal evolution is evident: Trump’s speeches begin in an institutional and impersonal register, then evolve towards a more subjective formulation, marked by the increasing use of the first person and a decrease in lexical density. This pattern indicates a specific structure of Trump’s presidential discourse, characterized by a gradual transition from a representative role to personal expression.