Lexical and stylistic means of the texts of election debates as one of the ways of communicative impact upon electorate

Abstract

This article is dedicated to the description of results acquired in the course of conducting lexical-semantic analysis of the texts of televised election debates. Speech of the candidates of the head of the Fifth Republic in the course of election campaigns of 2012 and 2017 served as the material for this study. The goal lies in examination of the ways of influencing the potential voters using the linguistic means. The authors carried out e lexical-semantic-stylistic analysis of research material, as well as explored substantive structure of the selected texts. The article also analyzes content of the speech of televised election debates, presented by the combination of the conveyed explicit and implicit information. The work also includes a summary table that demonstrates nuclear lexemes of the juxtaposed semantic complexes of texts. The results obtained in the course of lexical-semantic-stylistic analysis confirm the authors’ assumption that the texts of televised election debates contain semantic dichotomies that are one of the ways of influencing the electorate.