A corpus stylistic analysis of the lexico-morphosyntactic and pragmatic features of Ryan Chen's Trump impersonation

Abstract

Political impersonation has become a prominent form of digital performance, attracting large online audiences through the imitation of public figures’ voices, mannerisms, and speaking styles. In the rapidly evolving digital and educational landscape of ASEAN, such mediated political discourse highlights the need for greater attention to students’ digital literacy and critical awareness of how language constructs public identities and persuasive communication. Despite growing interest in impersonation as a communicative phenomenon, research has largely focused on phonetic resemblance and vocal performance, with relatively little attention devoted to the reproduction of deeper linguistic structures and communicative strategies. This study examines the linguistic features of Ryan Chen’s Trump impersonation performances by analyzing their lexico-morphosyntactic and pragmatic patterns. Adopting a corpus stylistic approach (Mahlberg, 2013), the study examines how Chen’s linguistic style is constructed through recurrent lexical, grammatical, and discourse patterns using a self-developed concordance machine programmed in Python with Tkinter for the GUI. The dataset consisted of five YouTube videos from Ryan Chen’s channel, transcribed and compiled into a small corpus of approximately 5,000 words. The data were analyzed using qualitative corpus-assisted discourse analysis, focusing on lexical patterns (evaluative adjectives, intensifiers, and recurrent lexical bundles), morphosyntactic constructions (parataxis, syntactic fragmentation, repetition-based structures, and discourse markers), and pragmatic functions (self-presentation, audience alignment, identity construction, evidentiality, and affiliative stance marking). The findings show a strongly repetitive lexical style. The intensifiers so, really, and very occurred 28 times in total, equivalent to 5.6 instances per 1,000 words. Recurrent expressions such as how you doing, very nice people, and I love/we love reflect audience engagement and positive evaluation. Morphosyntactically, the corpus is dominated by short declarative clauses, paratactic sequences, and repetition-based structures. Pragmatically, the performance relies on collective identity, self-presentation, audience alignment, and evidential or engagement markers such as you know and I heard. Overall, the findings indicate that Ryan Chen’s impersonation constructs a recognizable Trump-like style through recurrent lexical and syntactic routines and interactional strategies rather than through complex syntactic organization.