THE EXTRALINGUAL PECULIARITIES OF AMERICAN POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

American political discourse continues to arouse considerable interest among scholars of various disciplines, and constant emergence of new publications on this topic is a strong evidence for that. The prerequisite for such popularity to this type of speech activity is, on the one hand, the use of advanced communicative technologies of language nature, and, on the other hand, the outstanding personalities of the US politicians themselves. Undoubtedly, the main way to wage a political struggle with opponents for the favor of voters is to use various linguistic means: communicative strategies and tactics, stylistic devices, lexical units with pragmatic potential inherent at the semantic level, prosodic elements. However, when composing these elements in order to realize speakers’ communicative intentions, politicians and their speechwriters should take into account a number of extralinguistic factors historically formed by American society, which significantly affect the construction of political texts. The purpose of the article is to identify, describe and systematize such factors. The material for the analysis is the corpus of election speeches of the main candidates for the US presidency in 2020, Joe Biden and Donald Trump compiled from texts taken from the website The American Presidency Project. Speech processing, lexical items search, and access to context have been carried out using the corpus management software AntConc 3.4.4. In order to identify the relationship between extra-linguistic factors and the means of realizing their influence on the recipients, pragmatic and contextual analyzes of election speeches have been applied. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the identification and description of a complex of socio-cultural, historical and technological factors of a non-linguistic nature that influence the selection of tactics, topics and vocabulary of US political processes participants.