МАНИПУЛАТИВНА МОЋ ДИСКУРСА ПОЛИТИЧКОГ СПОТА У ПРЕДИЗБОРНИМ КАМПАЊАМА

Abstract

This paper explores the manipulative power of political video discourse in election campaigns from 2016 to 2020 by using critical discourse analysis and the cognitive linguistic theory of conceptual metaphors. The manipulative power of the discourse is revealed through micro and macro analysis during the studied period. The corpus of the research consists of videos used in election campaigns, television broadcasts, including the ones archived on the official YouTube channels. Since 1990, the year relevant for the onset of democratic elections, to this day, the sub-genre of a video within the advertising and propaganda genre in political discourse has been largely altered: thus, it is noted that it has abundantly been used in election campaigns since 2016, with more significant investments into production, becoming more diversified in terms of topics and content. These alterations are compliant with political objectives and shaped according to the manipulative and persuasive strategies which are the inherent component of the advertising and propaganda genre in general. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate all stylistic and linguistic means that have a manipulative nature. It has been demonstrated that persuasive and manipulative aims in this discourse are accomplished by using various conceptual metaphors, but also with vulgarization (the corpus contains a video where the sexual orientation of a candidate is topicalized), celebrity endorsements (prominent people appear as political candidate, promoters), and aggressive self-promotion.