This document analyzes the impoliteness strategies used by the Clinton and Trump presidential campaigns on Twitter during the 2016 US election. It finds that Trump's campaign frequently used bald-on-record impoliteness like name-calling and insults, while Clinton's campaign more often employed positive impoliteness like questioning Trump's abilities or experience. Both campaigns reacted to campaign events by increasing impolite tweets. The study analyzed over 12,000 tweets using frameworks of conventional impoliteness and strategies from Culpeper to understand differences in how each campaign communicated (im)politeness online.

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(Im)polite Politics: an analysis of
impoliteness during the 2016
Presidential campaign
Margaret Glide
Department Spanish & Portuguese, Indiana University
Ankit Shah
School of Informatics & Computing, Indiana University
Political discourse online in the 2016 United State Presidential election was contentious.
In particular, a lot of criticism was based upon levels of impoliteness, hateful speech, and
lack of professionalism. In this paper, we quantify and describe the (im)politeness
strategies from Culpeper (1996) and impolite linguistic formulae used by the Clinton and
Trump campaigns on Twitter. Additionally, we examine the use of (im)polite linguistic
structures of both campaigns, based on Culpeper’s (2010) impolite linguistic formulae.
Overall, each campaign uses its own brand of impoliteness strategies and structures. The
Clinton campaign utilized positive politeness strategies and question formulae to bring
her opposition’s character and political experience into question, which is similar to
previous accounts of politicians in face-to-face debates (Blas Arroyo, 2003; Escalona
Torres, 2016). Trump’s campaign, on the other hand, tended to utilize bald on-record
impoliteness with name-calling and condescending remarks toward his opposition most
frequently, which has not been observed frequently in previous studies on impoliteness in
politics. While each candidate maintained their impoliteness profile in terms of structure
and strategies, the rate at which they published impolite tweets appeared to be in
reaction with events during the campaign, such as scandals and debates.
Keywords: political discourse, (im)politeness, social media mining
Political discourse on social media is a relatively new phenomenon in the United States. The
2016 Presidential election generated discourse regarding the brash impoliteness of the political
candidates online which was utilized to question the potential success of their possible
presidencies. Due to the semi-anonymous and asynchronous nature of social media, users may be
more likely to display rude and direct behavior. Such behavior from the immediate future leaders
of the United States shapes the public discourse. In this paper we analyze the political discourse

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on social media generated by the two presidential campaigns from the two major parties to
observe the (im)politeness strategies exhibited by each campaign and to establish a comparison
with regards to the tone of language used in the political discourse. We focus on their political
discourse on Twitter for this study, given that it is the most widely used microblogging site, and
both campaigns have very strong following on the site.
Historically, the political conversations have been broadcast through televisions and
newspapers. However, this year, we observed the tone of (im)politeness that each campaign
emits to the general public from their widely followed Twitter accounts through quantitative and
qualitative analysis.
Previous Literature
Studies on politeness differentiate between first-order politeness from second-order politeness, in
that the former relates to the public and personal idea of what is polite or rude and the latter
refers to the theoretical operationalization of (im)politeness within linguistics. Second-order
(im)politeness typically has been operationalized by the relationship between speakers, contexts,
expressions, and co-constructed norms (Terkourafi, 2015; Culpeper, 2010). Brown & Levinson’s
(1987) notion of politeness as a linguistic theory is based on Goffman’s (1955) notion of “face”
or one’s public image, which is managed by one’s desire for approval (positive face) and
freedom from imposition (negative face). These faces can be enhanced or threatened within an
interaction according to the social parameters of social distance between interlocutors, power
relations, and the absolute ranking of the face-threatening act or FTA. These acts take the form
of speech acts, a linguistic utterance or a set of utterances that intends to accomplish an action in
an interaction such as a request, compliment, apology, etc. (Searle, 1967). Brown & Levinson
(1987) presuppose that some acts are inherently face-threatening within Anglo culture because
they still imply threatening a hearer’s face even with mitigation. Politeness strategies can be
operationalized from the most to least face-threatening, which is outlined in figure 1 below. This
theory proposes that the speaker considers the aforementioned social parameters to heuristically
decide how to execute a speech act in order to produce the most politic outcome. For example,
one can maintain an individual’s face who has more power and social distance by avoiding the
FTA or performing redressive action (i.e., further mitigation of the face-threatening effects such
as mitigation or explicit expression of not intending face threat).

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Figure 1 Brown & Levinson’s (1987: 316) strategies for FTAs
Similar to this politeness theory, Culpeper (1996) suggests a similar heuristic with bald on-record
impoliteness, positive impoliteness, negative impoliteness, sarcasm/mock impoliteness, and to
withhold politeness, which are outlined in table 1 below. Accepting that impoliteness is a
necessary part of social life at some point in our lives, this theory assumes that one can assess the
level of impoliteness that they would like to evoke according to the social parameters above in
order to enhance, optimize, or mitigate impoliteness in social interactions. These acts are
contextually managed between interactants. For example, impolite expressions such as “nasty
woman” could be delivered neutrally in a conversation among friends where that terminology is
accepted as humorous or empowering. However, utterances can be misconveyed or
misinterpreted as impolite as well if they are not delivered in the correct social context.
Table 1 Culpeper’s (1996) (im)politeness strategies utilized in qualitative analysis of tweets
(Im)politeness Strategy Description
Bald On Record Impoliteness Face-threatening Act (FTA) is performed directly with no considerations
for recipient’s face, such as name-calling and accusations.
Positive Impoliteness Damages positive face needs, such as seeking disagreement and attacks
on character (i.e., the desire to be approved of).
Negative Impoliteness Damages negative face needs, such as ridiculing an interlocutor (i.e.,
freedom from imposition).
Sarcasm or Mock
Impoliteness
Contextual considerations suggest that (im)politeness is insincere. Mock
impoliteness may convey social intimacy.
Withhold politeness Absence of politeness where it is expected within a formulaic convention
(e.g., not thanking someone)
Culpeper (2010) expands on his impoliteness theory by outlining the linguistic formulae of
impolite expressions in detail, such as insults, pointed criticisms/complaints, challenging
presuppositions, message enforcers, dismissals, silencers, threats, and negative expressives.
These structures represent the most likely to become impolite expressions; however, they are not
inherently impolite. These formulae will be further discussed in the analysis below.
For the current study, we examine the context, linguistic structure, and the impoliteness
strategies among the 2016 Presidential campaigns. Our research questions are as follows:

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1. What potentially impolite linguistic structures appear within the tweets of both
campaigns?
2. What impoliteness strategies do each of the campaigns utilize within their tweets?
3. Are there differences in the rate and style of impoliteness among the campaigns?
Sample and Data Collection
Utilizing TweePy, we mined 12,910 tweets from the Presidential and Vice Presidential
candidates of the 2016 election for this investigation. We included the vice presidential picks
within this analysis in order to expand our analysis to the campaigns rather than just the
individual presidential candidates. The extraction was executed on October 26, 2016 after the
final Presidential Debate, hence, all the candidates have tweets ranging from various starting
dates to October 26, 2016.
Table 2 Distribution of tweet corpora according to account
Candidate Tweets Mined Tweets After Convention (only
applicable to VP accounts)
Earliest Tweet
Captured
Donald Trump 3240 3240 2/4/2016
Hillary Clinton 3210 3210 6/22/2016
Mike Pence 3221 573 7/16/2016
Tim Kaine 3239 493 7/22/2016
12910 7516
Figure 2 Distribution and timeline of tweets within corpus

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We removed tweets from the Vice Presidential candidates before their respective conventions in
which their candidacy was first announced in order to ensure their tweet relevancy to the
campaigns. We recognize the value in the tweets that the VP candidates posted before their
nomination, but they would not necessarily contribute to the 2016 Presidential campaigns and
also could potentially inspire a different type of analysis that examines how their political stances
changed before and after their nominations. We leave this analysis for future studies.
Limitations in Data Collection
Twitter API caps the number of tweets that can be downloaded at approximately 3,240 latest
tweets resulting in a less robust sample than expected. The Twitter API, TweePy, truncates the
tweets that are retweets to append them with links to the original tweets. This causes a small
subset of the tweets to have abrupt endings. In our dataset, only 17 out of the 7516 exhibit such
truncation, hence, we decided to keep those 17 tweets as they were.
Finally, in order to keep the analysis consistent, we decided to apply similar constraints to all
candidates. We observed that since the frequency of tweets from the Hillary Clinton account is
significantly higher than the account of Donald Trump, we have a discrepancy in the duration of
period we are able to analyze for each of the candidate. We are, however, able to keep the
number of tweets for both candidates almost the same.
Assessments and Measures
We were able to automate the extraction for conventionalized (im)politeness using a text-
analytics software, PolyAnalyst. This software allowed us to define linguistic structures which
pointed to (im)politeness in the tweets. After extracting the tweets matching with patterns
defined by Culpeper (2010), we manually coded the tweets to identify the ones that represented
(im)politeness. We present a discussion on the linguistic structures examined in the section
Conventionalized (im)politeness.
Table 3 Culpeper’s (2010) conventional (im)politeness formulae
(Im)politeness Strategy Description Operationalization
Personalized Negative
Assertions
Association of a negative assertion with a
particular person done in a way that
highlights the negative quality of the
subject
[so] [negative_adjective]
[such a] [negative_adjective]
[cannot/will not] [verb] - (displays
incapability to do something)
Challenging Questions/
Presuppositions
Use of a question or a presupposition to
question the abilities/appropriateness of
the subject
[?]
Pointed Criticism Use of adverbs to amplify the criticism of
the subject
[adverb] [negative_adjective]
Personalized Third Person
Negative References
Referring to the subject in third person [he/she] [is] [negative_noun]
or [he/she] [has] [negative_adjective]
or [his/her] [attribute][is/are]
[negative_adjective]
Condescensions Undermining the subject by patronizing
or showing disdain
Use of specific condescensions used by the
candidates eg. [lyin] or [little] or [puppet]
etc.

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In terms of qualitative analyses, Culpeper’s (1996) impoliteness strategies, which are defined
below in table 3, were utilized to categorize the impoliteness strategies of choice of each of the
campaigns within their hashtag use. Additionally, a small sample of tweets (195 tokens per
campaign) was considered for a contextual analysis of impoliteness strategies. We intend to
expand this analysis to 25% of all tweets within our corpus, balancing for each account where
possible.
Results
Conventionalized (im)politeness
We found that comparatively small number of tweets adhered to the conventionalized
impoliteness formulae. A much larger proportion of Trump’s campaign tweets conformed to the
formulae as we found that Trump used Condescensions (~10% of his tweets) very frequently to
show his disdain towards his opponents.
Within the tweets from the Trump campaign, we saw over 99% (551) of impolite tweets
(556) come from Trump, and only 4 impolite tweets from Mike Pence. Trump most prominently
used condescensions. He also engaged in significant pointed criticisms (2.31% of his tweets) of
his opponents and their policies.
Table 4 Use of Conventionalized (im)politeness formulae from the Trump Campaign
Strategy Example DT
(3236)
MP
(573)
TOTAL
(3809)
Personalized
Negative
Assertions
Wow, interview released by Wikileakes shows quid
pro quo in Crooked Hillary e-mail probe.Such a
dishonest person - & Paul Ryan does zilch!
48 (1.48%) 0 (0%) 48 (1.26%)
Challenging
Questions/
Presuppositions
@AC360: "How can you unite a country if you've
written off tens of millions of Americans?"
#Deplorables #BigLeagueTruth #Debate
65 (2.00%) 2 (0.03%) 67 (1.75%)
Pointed
Criticism
Crooked Hillary Clinton and her team were
extremely careless in their handling of very
sensitive, highly classified information. Not fit!
75 (2.31%) 2 (0.03%) 77 (2.02%)
Personalized
Third Person
Negative
Reference
Crooked Hillary Clinton is a fraud who has put the
public and country at risk by her illegal and very
stupid use of e-mails. Many missing!
42 (1.29%) 0 (0%) 42 (1.10%)
Condescensions #CrookedHillary is nothing more than a Wall Street
PUPPET! #BigLeagueTruth #Debate
321
(9.91%)
0 (0%) 321
(8.42%)
Total Impolite
Tweets
551
(17.02%)
4 (0.69%) 555
(14.57%)
In Clinton’s campaign, the Vice Presidential candidate Tim Kaine, posted a small number of
impolite tweets. It is also worth noting that a large number of Tim Kaine’s impolite tweets were
either retweets or quotes from Clinton’s speeches. Clinton’s most prominent impoliteness was
the use of questions and/or presuppositions (2.47% of her tweets) which she used to frequently
question the capabilities of her opponents to lead the nation.

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Table 5 Use of Conventionalized (im)politeness from the Clinton Campaign
Strategy Example HC
(3157)
TK
(464)
TOTAL
(3621)
Personalized
Negative
Assertions
Live from Reno: Hillary discusses why
@realDonaldTrumps divisive rhetoric is so
dangerous to our future https://t.co/ha9uCsizby
13 (0.41%) 6 (1.29%) 19 (0.52%)
Challenging
Questions/
Presuppositions
Ask yourself: Do you want the guy who lost a
billion dollars in one year-running a casino!-to
run the U.S. economy? #debate
78 (2.47%) 6 (1.29%) 84 (2.31%)
Pointed
Criticism
Trump is running the most divisive campaign of our
lifetimes.
There's no innuendo or dog whistles anymore. It's
all out in the open now.
27 (0.85%) 1 (0.21%) 28 (0.77%)
Personalized
Third Person
Negative
Reference
He was a failure at business...and by wrecking his
business, he wrecked the lives of his workers." -
Hillary on Trump
25 (0.79%) 3 (0.65%) 28 (0.77%)
Condescensions We have undocumented immigrants in America who
are paying more federal income tax than a so-called
billionaire. #DebateNight
8 (0.25%) 1 (0.21%) 9 (0.24%)
Total Impolite
Tweets
151 4.78%) 17 (3.66%) 168 (4.63%)
Impoliteness Strategies
Due to the relatively low frequency of conventionalized linguistic formulae within our corpus,
we shifted our focus toward an additional qualitative analysis impoliteness strategies of each of
the campaigns, which is tabulated and exemplified in tables 6 and 7 below. Overall, both
campaigns tweeted primarily neutral tweets, particularly informative tweets on their rally
locations or laudatory tweets about their stances and campaigns. Both of the Vice Presidential
candidates displayed very infrequent impolite behavior. The Presidential candidates, however,
attacked the positive and negative faces of the other candidate frequently or enacted bald on
record impoliteness.
In particular, Trump’s campaign most frequently utilized bald on record impoliteness (260
tweets, 23.26%), which is the strongest expression of impoliteness. This strategy mostly
consisted of name-calling and accusations (e.g., Crooked Hillary, Lying Ted, Lightweight Rubio,
etc.). Their second most used impoliteness strategy was positive impoliteness (127 tweets,
11.36%), which criticized the political positions of his opponents and the merits of entities such
as the New York Times and mainstream media.

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Table 6 (Im)politeness strategies utilized in Trump’s campaign’s tweets
Strategy Example DT (934) MP (184) Total (1118)
Bald On-
Record
Impoliteness
I am self-funding my campaign and am
therefore not controlled by the lobbyists and
special interests like lightweight Rubio or
Ted Cruz!
259
(23.17%)
1
(.09%)
260
(23.26%)
Positive
Impoliteness
Remember that Marco Rubio is very weak
on illegal immigration. South Carolina
needs strength as illegals and Syrians pour
in. Dont allow it
104
(9.30%)
23
(2.06%)
127
(11.36%)
Negative
Impoliteness
There will be no amnesty!
#MakeAmericaGreatAgain #ImWithYou
45
(4.03%)
6
(.54%)
51
(4.56%)
Sarcasm In the last 2 weeks, I had $35M of negative
ads against me in Florida & I won in a
massive landslide. The establishment should
save their $$!
2
(.18%)
0
(0%)
2
(.18%)
No
impoliteness
Departing Farmers Round Table in Boynton
Beach, Florida. Get out & VOTE- lets
#MAGA!
EARLY VOTING BY FL. COUNTY
524
(46.87%)
154
(13.77%)
678
(60.64%)
Total Impolite
Tweets
410
(43.90%)
30
(16.30%)
440 (39.35%)
Clinton’s campaign utilized primarily positive impoliteness strategies, which represents the
second strongest expression of impoliteness (233 tweets, 20.97%). Her campaign’s positive
impoliteness strategies were primarily targeted toward the Trump campaign, focusing on his
personal character and his political beliefs. While other impoliteness strategies were more
infrequent, bald on-record and negative impoliteness strategies which ridiculed and attacked both
Trump and the Republican party were semi-frequent.

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Table 7 (Im)politeness strategies utilized within the Clinton campaign’s tweets
Strategy Example HRC (976) TK (135) Total (1111)
Bald On
Record
Impoliteness
The Republican Party platform is so hateful,
youd think Donald Trump wrote it himself.
80
(7.20%)
12
(1.07%)
92
(8.28%)
Positive
Impoliteness
If Donald Trump condones discrimination
against his own employees, how would he lead
our country?
213 (19.17%) 20 (1.79%) 233 (20.97%)
Negative
Impoliteness
America is already great. America is already
strong & I promise you, our strength, our
greatness, does not depend on Donald
Trump." -@POTUS
95 (8.55%) 8 (.72%) 103 (9.27%)
Sarcasm $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage. So sorry
Donald, if you're watching, we're not cutting
the minimum wage, we're raising the minimum
wage.
16 (1.44%) 1 (.09%) 17 (1.53%)
No
impoliteness
Donald Trump just became the Republican
nominee. Chip in now to make sure he never
steps foot in the Oval Office.
572 (51.49%) 94 (8.41%) 666 (59.95%)
Total
Impolite
Tweets
404 (41.39%) 41 (30.37%) 445 (40.05%)
In terms of effectiveness of these impoliteness strategies, this analysis was expanded to the most
influential hashtags, which are illustrated in figure 3 below. We found that Trump’s campaign
overall was more effective in the spread of their hashtags given that they constituted 10 of the
top 15 hashtags, and they contained various impoliteness strategies. This could indicate that the
impoliteness of Trump’s campaign was more visible than in Clinton’s campaign where hashtags
were implemented. However, the majority of influential hashtags from both campaigns were
neutral in nature, such as #Trump2016, #MakeAmericaGreatAgain, and #DemsInPhilly.

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Figure 3 Most influential hashtags in terms of mean favorites
Overall, very few hashtags displayed impoliteness strategies independently; however, with
more context, theoretically they could contribute to a tweet’s impoliteness. The majority of the
impolite tweets came from Trump’s campaign (e.g, #CrookedHillary, #DrainTheSwamp,
#ImWithYou).
Table 8 Impoliteness strategies within hashtags
Strategy Hashtag
No impoliteness #Trump2016, #MAGA, #DebateNight, #AmericaFirst,
#Debate, #Debates2016, #TrumpPence16, #VPDebate,
#VoteTrump
Bald on record impoliteness #CrookedHillary, #DrainTheSwamp
Negative impoliteness #ImWithYou
Discussion
Impoliteness strategies constitute roughly 40% of each campaign’s tweets within our corpus.
Overall, it is more common to be neutral rather than impolite, as we would expect. Within both
campaigns, we observed bald on-record and positive impoliteness along with questions and
condescensions. It is possible that these linguistic structures capture some of these impoliteness
strategies; however, the structures were observed less frequently than in the qualitative analysis
of the impoliteness strategies. Nevertheless, the detection of condescensions and questions and
their linguistic structures can be further enhanced through the observation of bald on-record and

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positive impoliteness, respectively, in further studies. For example, name-calling was a common
structure in bald on-record impoliteness and condescensions (e.g., Crooked Hillary, Lying Ted,
etc.). Additionally, questions often brought policy and personal character into question, which is
patently a positive impoliteness strategy.
In terms of typical political character, previous studies have shown that positive impoliteness
is the most commonly used impoliteness strategy among politicians within face-to-face debates
given that they need to bring their opponent’s policies into question in order to enhance their
own candidacy (Blas Arroyo, 2003; Escalona Torres, 2016; Kaul de Marlangeon, 2008).
Unsurprisingly, positive politeness was the Clinton campaign’s impoliteness strategy of choice,
which aligns with her identity as a seasoned politician. Bald on-record impoliteness, on the other
hand, has been observed infrequently. The frequent use of bald on-record impoliteness within
Trump’s campaign may be an innovative tactic within a political campaign.
As we explore the types and use of impoliteness utilized by the two campaigns, we find that
there is a shift in the way the two campaigns employ impoliteness to make their case. The
analysis of frequency of impolite tweets showed us that there is an interaction between the rate of
impoliteness, the candidate, and the month of the tweet. This trend suggests that the impolite
tweets represent reactions to real-time events.
Figure 4 Timeline of conventionalized impoliteness formulae utilized within the Trump
campaign’s tweets
We observed that, although there is a shift in the use of impoliteness over different periods of
time by different candidates, their prominent strategies of impoliteness consistently dominate
over other strategies. As seen in the chart above, for Trump, the most prominent strategy was to
use condescension to undermine his opponents. We did observe a rise in his use of pointed

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criticism around the time of the Democratic National Convention when he criticized the scandals
that were made public regarding the primary elections of the Democratic Party (i.e., the potential
rigging of the Democratic Presidential Nomination).
Figure 5 Timeline of conventionalized impoliteness formulae utilized within the Clinton
campaign’s tweets
As with Trump’s campaign, Clinton’s campaign also used one strategy very consistently to
attack their opponents, which was the use of questions and/or presuppositions to question the
capabilities of Trump campaign to handle the Presidential responsibilities. We observe a peak in
the use of questions and/or presuppositions around the first Presidential debate, where the
campaign posted a litany of tweets questioning Trump’s past actions at his personal and
professional capacities. Clinton campaign also used pointed criticism and personalized third
person negative references right before the first Presidential debate to mount an attack on the
Trump Campaign.
Conclusion
Overall, we find that the two campaigns used different impolite linguistic structures,
impoliteness strategies, and that they publish impolite tweets at higher rates within specific dates.
The trend of this timeline suggests that the impolite tweets represent a way for each candidate to
manage or cope with certain campaign events, such as the debates.
Each Presidential candidate has a distinct style and prefers a few potentially impolite
linguistic structures. The Vice Presidential candidates, on the other hand, kept their distance from
impoliteness for the most part. Clinton’s campaign displayed a typical politician’s profile of

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impoliteness, which was represented by positive impoliteness strategies within question
structures that brought Trump’s character and politics into question. In contrast, Trump’s
campaign innovated a way to be impolite in politics by utilizing bald on-record impoliteness
through condescending remarks regarding his opposition.
Further studies could explore this topic in a different direction by comparing these
impoliteness strategies to those used by other English-speaking politicians online. Additionally,
impoliteness structures could be examined in terms of impoliteness strategies, as we observed
with bald on-record impoliteness, positive politeness, condescensions, and questions.

14. 14
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