Intentionality and Its Representation in Monologue Campaign Speeches within the Framework of the US 2020 Election Discourse

Abstract

Modern linguistics pays more and more attention to the issues of political discourse as a communicative activity that attracts a large amount of public attention. Politicians’ campaign speeches, widely studied by public relations specialists, are an effective tool for promoting certain ideas during election campaigns and events. This approach is especially common in the United States of America where political figures running for a particular post often make monologue campaign speeches on the national television and/or directly in front of the voters. From a linguistic point of view, the question how various linguistic means of expressing an intentional orientation are implemented in pre-election campaign speeches of prominent US politicians seems to be a most interesting one. The purpose of this article is to consider the phenomenon of speech intention in the context of monological campaign speeches in the discourse of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, as well as to identify intentional patterns in their public speech construction. The object of the study is the intentionality of the political figures’ speech behavior as the most important factor in their speech interaction with the audience. A selection of monologue speeches by politicians during the 2020 election campaigns were used as material for the study. One of our objectives is to identify the specificity of the use of intentional vocabulary, grammatical and stylistic means that contribute to the expression of the intentional component by the chosen US politicians in their campaign monologues. The author of the article believes that the intentionality of the American politicians’ speech behavior presupposes a pragmatic effect on the mass recipient. At the same time, the addressee, whether s/he is an ordinary voter or a linguist, must be able to decode the intentions of the addressor, realized by him/her through the intentional speech behavior.