Denis Mukhortov

Calling some nations an enemy and others a friend is an effective manipulative tool with US presidents. It helps them keep the public unaware of the real state of affairs as people are gullible and would trust anything the leader of the nation may say, it enables him to build up the right policy, and, ultimately, secures him power as long as he can cajole people into voting for him. Alliances with other countries and presidents are made and broken due to the political and economic situation in a country. This makes the number of enemies and allies varying from year to year and today’s ally may be tomorrow’s enemy. This article discusses shifts in the concepts FRIEND and FOE in American presidential rhetoric between 2001 and 2018. The communications under analysis include presidential inaugural addresses, addresses to Congress, UN General Assembly, NATO headquarters, US Senate, Democratic National Convention, Economic Crisis speeches, commencement speeches, press conferences, intervi...

This article seeks to study political discourses of American female politicians, specifically Madeleine Albright, the first female United States Secretary of State in the history of the United States of America, from 1997 to 2001, Condoleezza Rice, the 66th United States Secretary of State, and Hillary Clinton, the 67th United States Secretary of State. Different in age, ethnicity, political views, educational and social backgrounds, they reveal that in order to succeed in the political arena, women are bound to hide their female personality. Examples in question are Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice, recurrent users of such male discursive features as rhetorical questions, logical order of arguments, conceptual metaphors of war, sports, and hunting. Gender-marked female discourse is characterized by hesitation, use of standard speech, cognitive, social words, and hedges. Research shows that Hilary Clinton is a typical example of the female-marked political discourse. This has ...

An analysis of presidential debates clearly brings into sharper focus the adversarial function of political discourse. Its manifestations may be an efficient tool for studying the stylistic behaviour of each presidential contender individually and all presidential contenders collectively. The adversarial function is understood as a politician’s use of signs of explicit verbal aggression in order to fight rivals, bash them, and estrange himself or herself from their views. The study, besides singling out confrontation markers of the contenders, claims that the debates show negative trends in the language culture of modern politicians. The predominant relativism, which American English has long been known for, is being replaced by blatant straightforwardness affecting the choice of words, communicative strategies and tactics, and the well-known etiquette rules. This signals the emergence of a new generation of US politicians who will sure affect the local politics and geopolitical are...

This article features the communicative behaviour of Tony Blair in his premier and post-premier years. It puts forward and corroborates the hypothesis that about two years after his landslide victory in the parliamentary election, Blair switched his strategy from that of an ardent reformer and a pacifist to a hawk, opportunist and conformist, and stuck to it to the end of his legislatures. The charges against Blair in 2016 on the nation’s involvement in the Iraqi military campaign in 2003 caused him to change his stylistic behaviour. Special emphasis is laid on how Blair had long exploited a series of communicative tactics with the intent to manipulate mass consciousness. These include epithets, syntactic repetitions and rhetorical questions; they become frequent in post-premier years. Blair’s selected discourses in 2003, when he was campaigning for Britain’s military involvement in Iraq, and in 2016, when he was trying to justify his actions in court, reveal deception markers, spec...

Political discourse as a specific sign system in which the meaning depends on the speaker’s intention tends to portray participants in terms of “us” versus “them”, which makes “us-versus-them” polarization one of the main distinguishing features of political discourse. The onset of the 21st century is a turning point in the history of geopolitics, which requires politicians to be more creative in search of vote-winning means. The pragmasemantic approach allows to study presidential debates between 1. Bush and Al Gore from the standpoint of semantics which studies meaning and which has been recently affected by pragmatics that deals with non-linguistic aspects of meaning such as the context of a situation and the speaker’s intention. The presidential debates of 2000 are a vivid illustration of how two opposing politicians strive to share the same objective though different language means. The contentanalysis program LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) was used in order to verify...