Prosodic means of creating expressiveness in the rhetoric of United States televised presidential debates (on the example of Hillary Clinton's speech in 2016)

Abstract

 This article reviews the expressive potential of prosodic means in Hillary Clinton's speech at the 2016 United States presidential debates. Special attention is given to the discursive characteristics of the text, such prosodic parameters as pitch variation, pausing, pace and intensity, as well as use of word accent. The author employs the method of auditory analysis of politician’s speech, and dwells on its certain fragments, which illustrate the effectiveness of suprasegmental modifications of speech for achieving an optimal rhetorical effect. The relevance of this research is substantiated by the need for comprehensive assessment of political discourse as a variation of communication with high manipulative potential. The scientific novelty consists in viewing the expressive capabilities of prosodic means in political discourse in light of extralinguistic factors that characterize the communicative situation, as well as in analysis of their functionality within a specific type of political discourse – the agonal genre, which brings its adversarial nature to the fore. The acquired results demonstrate the expressive potential of modifications of the key prosodic parameters in oral speech, and can be implemented in teaching the principles of analysis of political discourse texts from the perspective of expressive syntax, prosody, stylistic, and rhetoric to students majoring in philology.