FEATURES OF THE AMERICAN GENDER ARGUMENTATIVE POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

It is a common knowledge that politics has been primarily associated with men and for a long time, and the role of women in political life has been neglected and ignored. However, together with the appearance of the Women's Movement, which originated in the United States almost two centuries ago, and the global growth of the role of the political communication, women became more powerful and gained the audience's attention not only in this particular field, but others spheres of life as well. Thus, gender issues are now within the scope of close attention of linguists, and there are different approaches to gender studies. This paper is devoted to the establishing of similarities and differences of American argumenatative discourse of both men and women, the way they express their opinions and provide arguments, whether different or not, regarding the pressing issues (economic crisis, terrorism, social equalitry, etc.) during the political compaing of 2008 and 2016. Speeches of representatives of three different parties, namely the Republican Party, The Democratic Party, which are the most influential parties in the USA, and the Green party, which assigned women to the highest position in the country during both compaigns, were chosen for the purpose of the study. In the paper gender issue were examined from the point of view of topics of the speeches, usage of various argumentation tactics, and emotionality of the statements. The results of the study may be used for futher exploration of pacularities of political discourse in general and gender discourse in particular.