I’ve been spending some time lately studying President Trump’s speeches, and the deeper I go, the more I see something I hadn’t noticed before.
His speaking style has never been conventional; sometimes it’s so improvisatory and so informal that it’s hard to call his addresses “speeches” at all. (Trump himself calls the way he lurches from one subject to the next the “weave,” which is not a bad way to think about it.) But lately it seems to me he’s been leaning in particular on what linguists and grammarians call direct quotation.
If you say, “She told me she only goes on weekends,” that’s indirect quotation. You’re citing something another person said, but you’re braiding it into your own sentence, your own words. If you say, “She told me, ‘I only go on weekends,’” that’s direct quotation. You’re telling your audience: These are her words, directly as she spoke them.
Consider the way Trump referred to Vladimir Putin at the World Economic Forum at Davos last month: “He said, ‘I can’t believe you settled that one.’ They were going on for 35 years. I settled it in one day and President Putin called me, he said, ‘I can’t believe I’ve worked on that war for 10 years trying to settle and I couldn’t do it.’ I said, ‘Do me a favor. Focus on settling your war. Don’t worry about that one.’” Or what he said at Davos about Somali pirates: “And they say, ‘We’re going to blow up your boat.’ They have powerful weapons. You hit the side of the boat, you blow the whole thing up. The insurance companies are petrified. So they say, ‘Just give them the boat. We’ll give them money instead.’ And I don’t do that. We blow them right the hell out of the water.”
Do you hear it? It’s like Trump is performing a little skit, acting out the conversation rather than just telling you the outcome.
Everyone uses direct quotation to some degree. It is a normal component of fluent human speech and can help to make a point more vivid. But traditionally formal language favors indirect quotation, as more neutral and less performative. Trump has always been one to blow through norms and traditions, and his fondness for direct quotation feels like a natural result.
As baggy as his speaking habits were compared to those of past presidents, it seems to me that he didn’t use direct quotation as much during his first term, at least not in official speeches. In 2017, for example, he delivered an address on America’s national security strategy. The speech was hardly grandiloquent, but he wasn’t standing before people of authority and re-enacting conversations and internal monologues, either.
Now consider his recent remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. “So I get a ‘Hi, Mike, what’s up? What time is it?’ ‘It’s 3 o’clock in the morning. So we have nine names that are giving us difficulty. They want to have a phone call.’ I said, ‘All right, let’s go. Here we go.’”
Or: “I’m sitting up being introduced by a Democrat or somebody. And he said, ‘While Donald Trump did not win the popular vote, he won the presidency, here he is.’ I said, ‘That was terrible.’ I said, ‘We won the popular vote by a lot.’”
Compare that to the way Barack Obama communicated. He was hardly a stuffy speaker. His approachable grace at the podium helped get him elected president twice. He rarely used direct quotation at all.
Direct quotation is interesting to linguists because transforming words and expressions into vehicles of verbal performance fosters a lot of innovation, driving the ongoing evolution of language.
For example, one of the things about modern English that would most strike a time traveler from the past is the frequency of “I was like …” among younger speakers, as in “And I was like ‘You don’t really mean that!’” This is direct quotation, contrasting with the indirect version “And I said that she didn’t really mean that.”
When the expression started getting around in the 1970s and 1980s, “was like” was a way to introduce actual mimicry. But today, “I was like” is often just an undramatic stand-in for “I said,” with no mimicry involved. The use of “all” as in “And she was all, ‘You better not!’” developed in the same way around the same time. Who, a century ago, could have predicted that the word “all” would end up as a quotation marker? Black English gets into the game too, using “come” as a setup for direct quotations: “And he comes tellin’ me ‘I can’t do it till next week!’”
Direct quotation even plays a role in a cornerstone debate over what makes human language distinct from animal communication. According to one hypothesis favored by adherents of Noam Chomsky’s work, our ability to nest phrases and clauses into one another is key. Instead of saying “The man was tired” and then “That man went to sleep,” we can say “The man who was tired went to sleep,” nesting the two distinct facts within the same sentence. That’s recursion. It allows us to pack more into a sentence more efficiently, making our communication richer. Indirect quotation is a form of recursion.
It’s more subtle, and it takes a while to learn, which is why little kids are more likely to just repeat another speaker’s words. In one study, young children watched a puppet show and were then asked to describe what they saw. The 4-year-olds relied strongly on direct quotation. Older children were more likely to use the indirect option.
In the light of all of this, Trump’s seemingly growing fondness for direct quotation feels consistent with his determination to say whatever he wants to say (e.g., calling a female reporter “Piggy”) however he wants to say it. More and more, he speaks as though he’s at a raucous rally, even when he’s at an official function. He is verbally letting it all hang out wherever he goes, the linguistic equivalent of wearing his Mar-a-Lago golf togs to deliver the State of the Union.
CODA:
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