From ‘!’ to ‘???’: Paralinguistic Encoding of Stance in Donald Trump’s Twitter Discourse

This study examines punctuation as a paralinguistic resource in digital political discourse, focusing on its role in encoding stance in a corpus of tweets produced by Donald Trump. Drawing on a dataset of 1000 tweets, the analysis combines quantitative and qualitative approaches to identify patterns in the use of exclamatory, interrogative, and mixed punctuation forms. The findings suggest that punctuation functions systematically as a mechanism of textual amplification, shaping the expression of evaluation, emotional intensity, and interactional meaning. Repeated exclamation marks are closely associated with heightened stance and emphasis, while interrogative forms frequently function rhetorically to signal doubt and challenge rather than to request information. Mixed forms further demonstrate the flexibility of punctuation in encoding multiple layers of meaning within a single utterance. The analysis also shows that punctuation operates in close interaction with lexical intensifiers and capitalization, forming clusters of meaning that reinforce communicative force. By foregrounding punctuation as a meaningful semiotic resource, the study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how written discourse adapts to the constraints of digitally mediated communication. It argues that punctuation should be treated as an integral component of pragmatic and discourse-analytic inquiry and highlights its role in the construction of stance in contemporary digital political discourse.