Language portrait of an American in inavguration speeches by us presidents

Abstract

The article outlines lexical, axiological and syntactic features of the linguistic portrait of the American on the material of the inaugural speeches of the US presidents. These political speeches have a tremendous impact on the formation of the image and ideology of the nation and can potentially alter or motivate the behavior of their addressees. The linguistic portrait emerges as a result of the gradual description of the linguistic identity which in our case is marked by the ethno-cultural specificity stipulated by the picture of the world, the mentality and national character of one of the most powerful nations in the world. Nominations containing the lexeme American were selected as the object of research. American linguistic identity is considered as a collective ethnic identity represented by lexical nominations of the Americans with their values verbalized through contextual clues. Lexical portrait of the Americans in the inaugural speeches contains racial, social, age, gender, quantity, personality, local and temporal features determined while analysing the combinability of the aforementioned nominations. The syntactic portrait is modeled by means of frequency analysis of syntactic functions (subject, predicative, object or attribute) peculiar to the nominations of Americans in presidential inaugural speeches. Diachronic changes of the American linguistic portrait are considered over three periods of US history: nation in the making, urbanization and recent history.