The French school of discourse analysis

The article focuses on the analysis of political discourse, which penetrates the modern society. Political discourse is made up by politicians. Under the framework of cognitive and communicative paradigm political discourse is a complex communicative phenomenon which is directly or indirectly aimed at distributing, exercising the political power and winning the majority of votes during election campaigns. The article yields the results of the analysis of communicative strategies in the political discourse of US President-elect Joe Biden during the presidential race and in his inaugural address. The focus is on the notion of persuasion, persuasive communicative strategies and tactics in political discourse. Persuasion, as a linguistic and cognitive process, is addressed to make a communicative impact on the addressee with the aim to convince him/her to support certain ideas. Persuasion is an illocutionary characteristic of persuasive communicative strategies. The research concludes that a persuasive impact on the audience is made by the tactics of contrast, generalization, reference to authority, and also myth-making. The tactic of contrast is based on semantic polarization. With the help of the generalization tactic the appeal to collective addressee as well as society solidarization are realized. The tactic of reference to authority is represented, on the one hand, by the appeal to religious context, on the other hand, by the appeal to famous historical figures. Historical background is also the basis for myth-making. The main pragmatic aim of the political discourse of US President is a call for unity and respect of democratic values.

Introduction. The article compares the methods of researching political discourse with special attention to linguistic methods, in particular, to discourse analysis and cognitive and rhetorical approaches. These methods are widely used to study political speeches, statements, texts. Increasingly, political discourse is seen as a social phenomenon, not only at the discursive but also on the cognitive and rhetorical levels. The object of this study is methods of analysis of political discourse allowing to study the position of a politician in the discursive sphere and to identify the character of his audience. The subject of the analysis are examples from Joe Biden's political speeches, seen as an instrument of influence, persuasion in the process of speaking to the electorate. The relevance of the work is determined by the need to develop arguments to choose a particular approach to political discourse, especially cognitive and rhetorical, as well as discourse analysis, which allow to reveal veiled meanings of political statements and consider the methods of persuasion of the electorate.Methodology and data sources. The subject of the analysis are examples of Joe Biden’s political speeches, seen as an instrument of influence, persuasion in the process of speaking to the electorate. To compare approaches the study of political discourse, descriptive and comparative methods are used, the effectiveness of different approaches and methods is illustrated by specific examples of linguistic interpretation of discursive features of publications and speeches, revealing the ambitions of the politician most fully. A method of quantitative counting is also used.Results and discussion. The use of descriptive and comparative methods makes it possible to compare different approaches to the study of political texts and speeches, to discuss the relationship of heterogeneous methods, to identify the most effective methods of studying discourse. The result of the article was the conclusions about the effectiveness of different approaches to the study of the language of politicians at discursive, cognitive and rhetorical levels. Comparison of methods of research of political discourse distinguishes discourse-analysis among other methods of analysis. The use of discourse analysis to study political discourse reveals the functions of discourse, for example, manipulative, selective and combined functions related to political goals. The use of critical discourse analysis allows you to identify these functions most fully.Conclusion. The study of political discourse can be carried out at different levels, but the discursive level compared to cognitive and rhetorical levels is the most effective from a linguistic point of view. Discourse analysis allows to explore political discourse at more qualitative different level than rhetorical and other linguistic methods of research. Discourse analysis is presented as a method of researching hidden meanings in politics in this article.

Drawing on recent Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) approaches that map text over relevant context as supported by Van Dijk (2006), in this research, it was tried to follow this research route. The main intention was to look at political discourse via the lenses of PDA to see whether ideologies and power relations of interlocutors in the target setting of this study could have possibly been aligned with linguistic elements-here rhetorical devices and to see to what extent such text-context mapping is recognized as relevant to language tools within the selected datasets. Accordingly, the researcher tried to follow a sample of political talk- live 2008 US presidential debates- among two Republic vs. Democratic campaigns. To do so, some political strategies for argumentation including Van Dijk’s model representing 'Authority', 'Topos or burden', 'Future Representations’, ‘Comparison', 'Consensus', 'Counterfactuals', 'populism’, 'generalizations', and 'number Games' were mapped over some linguistic rhetorical devices such as ‘metaphor’, ‘hyperbole’, ‘irony’, ‘euphemism’, etc. The common discoursal moves in Obama’s vs. McCain's speech statements were compared and contrasted among similar strategies to find any emergent rhetorical devices. Findings indicated that 1) the political candidates had made use of rhetorical and political moves in tandem within the same propositional units, 2) some employed discourse devices were paralleled with the majority of political strategies like repetition and metaphor, and 3) some political strategies had been used to excess like 'comparison’, 'populism' and 'future representation’ respectively.

The present chapter proposes to build bridges between political discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. We intend to bring to light methodological benefits arising from the synergy of (political) discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, pointing to fruitful contribution from French text statistics. Taking the discourses of Nicolas Sarkozy as an example, we show how political discourse analysis can benefit from a reflection on corpora (their constitution, their role in the research process); on linguistic analysis and processing methods (particularly the computer-assisted methods of text statistics); and finally on the interpretative paths at a time of establishment of a numerical hermeneutics.

Starting from the thesis that critical discourse studies, with their qualitative, critical and explanatory approach to the study of political communication, represent a valuable complement to the dominant approaches that privilege the positivist paradigm and quantitative research, in this paper we tried to provide more complex insights into the scientific contributions of these studies to the study of political discourse, through observing the specifics of their theoretical-methodological frameworks, analytical categories and interpretive procedures. For this purpose, some of the key features of Teun van Dijk's sociocognitive approach, Paul Chilton's cognitive-linguistic approach, Ruth Wodak's discursive-historical approach and Norman Fairclough's dialectical-relational argumentative approach were considered. In the introductory part of the paper, we provided an overview of the general distinctive features, main starting points and research interests of the critical analysis of political discourse, as well as an insight into the basic dilemma related to the scope of the content of the term "political discourse". The central part of the work consists of two complementary parts. In the first part, we started from the presentation of the analytical aspects of the following levels and dimensions of the political discourse structure: topics, superstructures or textual schemata, local semantics, lexicon, syntax, rhetoricand speech acts. Using an analytical-synthetic approach, we connected the semantic-grammatical dimensions of the textual level and the cognitive-pragmatic dimensions of the discursive level of production and analysis of political discourse. The second part of the central part of the work is focused on the presentation of the theoretical framework of the argumentative approach to political discourse, as a kind of upgrade and reframing of existing conceptual settings and analytical categories. In the concluding review of the insights reached in the article, as the main scientific contribution of critical studies of political discourse, we singled out the way in which is achieved the synthesis of systemic, but contextually sensitive textual analysis on the one hand, and descriptive, normative and explanatory viewpoints of critical social research, on the other.

The relevance of this study is conditioned by the comparison of the original texts (in Kazakh) and translated texts (in English) within the framework of the analysis of political discourse and translation analysis. The purpose of the study is to identify the features, patterns, and difficulties for translators to comprehensively assess the adequacy (quality) of the translation and recommendations for compilation to facilitate the translation process. The paper provides a comparative analysis of the modern Kazakh political discourse and its translation into English to identify the features of the translation of language tools, taking into account their pragmatic potential. The theoretical relevance and originality of this research are due to the considerably increased interest in the study of political discourse in the aspect of translation. A comparative approach in political discourse consisting of two languages can be a useful material for studying and comparing political discourse in each of the languages, as well as arouse interest in further research of translation in this language pair. The practical relevance lies in the fact that the presented results can be used in teaching courses of the following disciplines: onomastics, pragmalinguistics, terminology, political science, LSP (language for special purposes), and SPVE (special professional vocabulary of the English language). The materials of this paper can be useful in the field of international relations for international specialists, journalists, translators.

From its colonial history, twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago inherited a uniquely diverse population of 1.3 million, including descendants of East Indians, Africans, Chinese, Syrians and Lebanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and British, among others. The legacy of British divide et impera, paired with perceived ethnic diversity, has been marking and re-producing a deep Us vs. Them division, especially between two major ethnic groups of East Indians (35.4%) and Africans (34.2%). For over forty years, two ethnic groups have been struggling for political control through census counts and voting along ethnic lines. Although elections in country have always served as the critical arbiter in adjudicating rival claims by main ethno-cultural communities for power and privilege (Premdas 2004: 19), 2010 General Election seemed to have marked a turning point in history of nation. On May 24th, Trinidad and Tobago elected Kamla Persad-Bissessar, its first female Prime Minister and only second person of East Indian origin to hold PM office in 48 years of independence. Breaking out of country's rigid bipolar political mould, Persad-Bissessar won as leader of People's Partnership, a new coalition party that comprised both East Indian and African political forces and movements. She defeated Patrick Manning's People's National Movement and succeeded in winning 29 seats out of 41 in House of Representatives. Taking this unprecedented political success as its starting point, this dissertation explores discursive and political strategies behind Persad-Bissessar's election, analyzing a large corpus of textual and visual data from People's Partnership campaign. The starting assumption is that Persad-Bissessar broadened her electorate not only by presenting a carefully engineered coalition party but also by discursively positing a new, inclusive identity space throughout campaign and advocating a politics of inter-ethnic harmony in country. Therefore, I set to analyze how Persad-Bissessar engaged in a multi-levelled discursive construction of identities, defining her role as first woman PM candidate in history of country, legitimizing her coalition solution to political tribalisms, as well as fostering a wider national sense of belonging. As political communication has increasingly grown beyond realm of verbal language, understanding Persad-Bissessar's political meaning-making required both analysis of her election speeches as well as study of a number of multimodal texts, such as video and printed ads as well as official portraits, which played a crucial role in political advertising of her coalition. Within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, I will combine 'Discourse-Historical Approach' (Wodak and Meyer 2009) for analysis of Persad-Bissessar's textual data and Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) 'Visual Grammar' for analysis of visual data. Although English-speaking Caribbean is home to largest set of continuing democracies among postcolonial countries around globe, political discourse from archipelago is yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. The analysis of political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago has potential to shed light on complexities, struggles and contradictions of postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago by integrating knowledge about historical sources and social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded. Starting from analysis of political discourse, this work aims at offering a new, discursive perspective on ethnicity, identity and power in Trinidad and Tobago as well as increasing scholarly awareness for development of a critical interpretative stance for political texts and talks beyond Euro-American zone.

Introduction. Political discourse analysis is a field of discourse analysis which focuses on discourse in political forums (such as debates, speeches, and hearings) as the phenomenon of interest. Discourse originating in political institutions can be subdivided into genres that are instrumental in policy-making and thus produced by and addressed to politicians and genres that communicate, explain, and justify political decisions, produced by politicians and addressed to the general public . This article investigates the role of translation and interpreting in political discourse. Purpose of this article is to define and characterize the linguocultural features of the German language in the political discourse and its translation into Ukrainian. Methods. In this study, the following types of research methods were used: descriptive method (by which the use of a certain type of translation was justified), transformation method (using this method, various types of lexical and grammatical transformations (transduction, descriptive translation, tracing) were investigated), statistical method (consists in counting the corresponding linguocultural units by thematic groups and by means of translation of realities). Results. Public speaking is a special form of language activity in terms of direct communication, a language addressed to a specific audience, ie oratory. Oratory is characterized by a number of features that determine its essence (the presence of the reaction of the speaker's speech, oral form of communication, the relationship between literary language and its oral embodiment, the use of various means of communication). Three approaches to the study of political discourse have been explored (descriptive, critical, cognitive). Originality of this study is due to the increased attention of modern linguists and translators to the study of non-equivalent vocabulary and socio-political realities in the political discourse of the German language and the methods of their reproduction in Ukrainian. Conclusion. Political discourse is an essential component of sociocultural communication, the main features of which are interests, goals and the formation of public opinion, which is necessary for the author of political discourse. The functions of political discourse include: information dissemination, agenda setting, projection into the future and the past. The most important function of political discourse is considered the function of political propaganda, persuasion and influence.

The paper explores the political discourse of the Federal Republic of Germany during the period from 1991 to 2005 as a reflection of sociopolitical transformations associated with national reunification, economic modernization, and the redefinition of national identity. The relevance of the present study is determined by the growing interest of contemporary humanities scholarship in language as a key mechanism for the formation and transmission of political meanings under conditions of large-scale socio-political transformations. Special attention is given to the role of language as a tool of political integration, legitimation, and ideological representation. The aim of the study is to identify and describe the linguistic strategies employed by leading German politicians (H. Kohl, G. Schröder, J. Fischer, among others) to influence public consciousness under conditions of institutional and value shifts. The scientific relevance of the research lies in uncovering the structural and pragmatic features of German political discourse in the era of the “Berlin Republic.” Its practical significance lies in the applicability of the findings to contemporary political communication and language policy development. The study is based on discourse analysis, pragmalinguistics, content analysis, and frame analysis. The corpus includes parliamentary speeches, interviews, and official statements. The research identifies key metaphorical models (“blossoming landscapes,” “push forward,” “never again Auschwitz”), strategic narratives (unity, reform, global responsibility), value frames, and rhetorical techniques. The results demonstrate that political language served integrative, legitimizing, and normative functions within the German public sphere. The study contributes to political linguistics by revealing the mechanisms through which language articulated post-socialist and post-national dynamics in German society. Its findings are relevant to experts in political communication, sociolinguistics, and discourse studies.

У статті розглянуто комунікативні недоліки в політичному дискурсі, що виникають у безпосередніх комунікативних діях, які викликані дисбалансом політичної ситуації в суспільстві. Щоб уникнути комунікативних недоліків у політичному дискурсі, політики намагаються застосовувати відповідні стратегічно передбачувані комунікативні тактики. Проведено аналіз того, про що вони говорять, думають, у чому вони переконані та що ставлять за мету донести до відома суспільства, в чому переконати, користуючись сугестивними комунікаціями. Наведено перелік успішних комунікативних тактик у політичному дискурсі.

The article considers the discursive dominants represented in the political Internet discourse and official political discourse. Subjective (characteristic and axiological), actional and spatial dominants are analyzed. The patterns of foregrounding certain situation components are established. The aim of the present study is to analyze foregrounding of certain discursive dominants depending on the political communication type. The authors set the following tasks to achieve this goal: to study the subject-related theoretical material, to analyze the frequency of the discursive dominants in the political communication, to identify the realization features of the speaker's intention in the political Internet discourse and in the official political discourse.The material for the analysis were the US Presidents utterances in the social network, as well as official documents of the Presidential Actions, posted on the website of the US Government. The authors of the article use various methods, including observation and description, comparative method, contextual analysis, discourse analysis. The study scientific novelty lies in the comparison of two different spheres of the political communication. In the process of discourse interaction certain discursive dominants appear. Politicians statements in social networks often contain an actualized subjective dominant, which allows to affect the information perception by the recipient. At the same time, in the texts of official documents, the actional dominant is brought to the forefront, which is directly related to the participants actions.

The war unleashed by Russia in 2022 is widely presented in online versions of English-language newspapers; Ukraine is constantly in the epicentre of the world news. This study highlights political and ideological contexts of the war in Ukraine, the sociopolitical and cognitive aspects of news according to an interdisciplinary approach considering the language as a social practice. The article highlights the polarization in the presentation of the events and the main actors entitled in the discursive strategies, representing the dichotomy In- versus Out-group. The study is aimed at the investigation of the ideological structures and their manifesting linguistic devices in political discourse based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of discursive strategies for constructing the images of Ukraine and Russia in the British and American press. The integrated Critical Discourse Analysis was applied to the research of the news to study the media discourse and the language, where CDA focuses on social practice, social power and ideology. Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) is used to research the ideology of war images presented in the language of news reports. The relevance of this study determined by the aim is to show the main discursive strategies of polaeization in political media discourse. The research methods of the article combine three vectors of the analysis by Fairclough with explanatory tools (by van Dijk), and the elements of stylistic analysis and Critical Metaphor Analysis. The illustrative material was collected by information search and continuous sample from the open access newspapers and magazines issued in the US and Great Britain (The Daily Mail, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and others). Conclusion. This research argues that polarisation is being demonstrated in the media discourse on the war in Ukraine in 2022. The taxonomy of the identified discursive strategies of polarization deployed in the media political discourse includes labelling, evidentiality, number game, hyperbolism, victimization, personalization and analogy, that can either be used singly or intervened. The discursive strategy of evidentiality is applied to authorities, officials, witnesses that are accepted as trustworthy sources of data; the number game strategy combined with victimization are verbalized by metaphoric simile, metonymy, enumerating and magnifying the numbers with the modifying adverbs; the strategy of hyperbole conveys the positive impression of the in-group and negative acts magnification of the out-group verbalized by metaphor, metonymy, metaphtonymy; the personalization strategy is deployed with the purpose of foregrounding the positive actions of the in-group that implies negative out-group actions; the strategy of analogy is applied in the comparison of the war in Ukraine and the struggle of the Ukrainians for their independence with other historical events. Linguistic means used to realize the discursive strategies of polarization include the conceptual metaphor, metonymy, simile, idioms, metaphtonymy, intertextual allusion and personification.

This article is an overview of West-European and Asian linguistic discussion of the issue of the addressee as one of the key components of political discourse. It considers the concept of political discourse addressee as well as the issue of speech influence and discourse manipulation since the latter is the most important characteristic of the type of discourse under consideration. To date, actualization of the addressee in political discourse is not sufficiently studied; hence, there is a respective gap in political discourse studies. This conclusion is made upon reviewing modern trends in political discourse research in West-European and Asian linguistics, critical discourse analysis being the major and the most representative of them, with the contribution of political discourse analysis and critical applied linguistics. The overview shows that the linguistic trends listed above have contributed greatly into the study of discourse, in general, and political discourse, in particular. The article also demonstrates the results of the study of political discourse addressee as groups of voters, conducted in papers on communication theory and PR-practices and argues that such approach appears insufficient as it must be augmented by the study of the addressee in terms of cognitive linguistics. This paper concludes that an addressee of political discourse is not in the focus of modern West-European linguistics and thus requires further in-depth analysis, which can be done by applying the communicative-cognitive approach in its multimodal aspect.

The study of political communication in the current international situation is in the focus of the interests of many sciences, including psycholinguistics. The article is devoted to the study of modern political Internet discourse as a specific form of communication. The general approaches to the phenomenon of discourse in modern linguistics are covered. The concepts of "political discourse" and "political Internet discourse", their similarities and differences are clarified and analyzed from the point of view of system-forming features and cognitive-discursive activity of communication participants. The peculiarities of nominative metaphors used for naming political events participants and their potential for speech impact in conditions of "information warfare" are investigated. The author stresses the fact that the correctly chosen method of speech influence can significantly affect the political views of the addressee. The article concludes that political Internet discourse is a syncretic phenomenon that modernizes and transforms the functions of political communication through the possibilities of the Internet. The dominant role of the factor of noninstitutionality, informativeness, emotionality, semantic uncertainty and theatricality of the political Internet discourse is emphasized by the functioning of political metaphors reflecting the specific characteristics of the object and having a psychological effect on the recipient. The specific characteristics of communication and the peculiarities of cognitive-discursive activity of political event participants allows us to distinguish the political Internet discourse as a separate type of dis-course.

The article reveals the relevance of the study of populist political discourse in the context of modern socio-political processes, and justifies the need to find effective tools for solving research tasks. It is emphasized that the multifaceted nature of the study of populism (as a political technology, as a specific nature of political activity, as a socio-political phenomenon, as an ideology, etc.) actualizes the problem of finding effective methods of its research, determining the essence of this phenomenon of political reality. In this context, the potential of the methods of discursive psychology as a possible tool for the study of political populist discourse is analyzed. Discursive psychology is defined as one of the directions of social constructivism. The possibilities of using the tools of this field of knowledge for the study of populist discourse are revealed. Also the possibilities of discourse analysis and its application for decoding meanings and interpreting information in the process of social interaction are analyzed. It is shown that the participants of this interaction are considered by discursive psychology, on the one hand, as products of certain discourses, on the other hand, as their producers, as agents of cultural reproduction and social changes. The main theoretical and empirical studies of discourse, which were formed within the framework of discursive psychology, are analyzed. The main provisions of M. Foucault’s post-structuralist theory are revealed, which is based on the analysis of the interrelationship of discourse, power and the subject. The main provisions of the theory of interactionism are highlighted and the approach to discourse as a manifestation of the inner world of a person, which is formed in the process of social interaction – a kind of "exchange of symbols" through interaction, is analyzed. Based on the research results of J. Potter and M. Wetherell, an attempt, within the synthetic approach, to combine these two paradigms is analyzed. The main principles of discursive psychology are singled out, the use of which is, in the opinion of the author, expedient for the study of political populist discourse. As a result of the research, the author came to the conclusion about the expediency of using the methods of discursive psychology as a tool for researching political populist discourse, the significant heuristic potential of the selected methods for political science, in particular in linguistic and discursive research of political populist discourse.