The Two Voices of Trump

Reams have been written about Donald Trump’s astonishing mendacity (see The Washington Post’s one-stop-shopping compilation of his Four-Pinocchio lies, from back in March; five months of shocking fibs and howlers have passed since then). But now some are trying to analyze not just his use of lying as a game plan but his curious bivocalism. Like a rhetorical Tuvan overtone singer, he seems to be able to issue two different messages simultaneously. Nathan Heller, in a September 1 New Yorker article, tries to explain it through an analogy with candles and perfumes:

I really am not sure what such passages are getting at. But I get a sense that people may be trying to tie down certain aspects of human linguistic communication without having the necessary technical understanding or terminology.

One thing that might be relevant is the distinction linguists standardly make between two layers of meaning, the domains of semantics and pragmatics.

Semantics deals with the literal meaning of sentences; pragmatics deals with the interpretations conferred on utterances in context.

Take the sentence Your shoes are still in the middle of the living-room floor. Taken literally, it simply specifies the continued central location of a pair of shoes belonging to the addressee in a certain living room. That’s semantics.

But when uttered by a parent to a child an hour before dinner guests arrive, it could have a radically different effect: It could serve as a polite reminder that the living room should be clear of miscellaneous clutter before the guests come, and the addressed child was already told some time ago to clear those shoes away but has neglected to comply. That’s pragmatics.

How could the latter possibly be derived from the former, given that the sentence mentions nothing about prior requests or clearing of clutter or arrival of guests? Via inferences contributed by the addressee, and based on relevance (see the crucial book on pragmatics by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition). Competent hearers naturally search for implications of utterances that comport with their interests. They attempt to find an interpretation of whatever has literally been said that makes it relevant for them.

A statement about the spatio-temporal coordinates of a pair of shoes would have little interest or relevance unless one was searching for those very shoes. But raising the subject by remarking on the location might trigger a memory of being told to clear up.

What’s more, it does it politely, avoiding commands. Instead of telling someone to do something it puts them in the position of processing a sentence whose content should remind them that they were meant to do it.

However, it’s an overstatement to say that sentences (or words) therefore have no meaning. Heller seems to skate way too close to that. His claim that “the words don’t convey information but ... serve as aesthetic trappings” goes too far. Trump’s sentences mean what they mean, semantically. The question is whether they can pragmatically imply something distinct from their literal meaning.

For communication isn’t all directly through words and their meanings. It’s achieved by addressees’ natural tendency to look for relevance and actively seek purpose in other people’s speech acts, and by other factors as diverse as how you hold yourself, where you look, whether you lift your chin, how loudly you speak, what intonation contour you choose, and whatever Scott Adams means by Trump’s “tone” in this highly relevant blog post (which unfortunately I do not have the space to discuss here).

Any of these might have something to do with what people are trying to say when they talk about Trump’s ability to put out two messages simultaneously: that the semantics says one thing and the pragmatically conveyed meaning says another. Maybe Heller meant that. I don’t actually know. But it’s his job to explain what he means, as unambiguously and clearly as possible.