THE VERBAL COMMUNICATION LEVEL OF A LINGUISTIC PERSONALITY (BASED ON PUBLIC SPEECHES OF D. TRUMP)

Abstract

One of the urgent research areas of modern political linguistics deals with constructing verbal portraits of political leaders. Political linguopersonology allows studying the linguistic personality of a politician from two perspectives: as a concrete author of certain utterances with a number of personal characteristic features (temper, interests, motives) and as a typical representative of a certain linguoculture. This paper analyzes public speeches of the US President D. Trump with the purpose of making up his verbal portrait. The analysis focuses on the verbal-semantic level of the linguistic personality (basic one, including the lexicon). Trump’s public speeches are full of the feeling of patriotism and contain numerous appeals to the traditional American values - democracy, freedom, personal freedoms and human rights. The speeches abound in lexical repetition and reduplication, which are most frequently used to attract the audience’s attention to a certain fact of reality, or to convince the recipient and to focus their attention on a certain object. Trump often uses the tactics of thanking. Another means of intimization of the communicative situation consists in frequent usage of phrasal verbs. In order to reinforce the emotional impact, especially during debates, Trump resorts to invective vocabulary, traditionally avoided in political discourse. As a rule, Trump’s public speeches have an emotional coloring, and specifically due to the abundance of metaphors and epithets. Thus, D. Trump positions himself as a powerful public speaker capable to discredit the opponent by speech and language techniques, who can create the feeling of his being close to the people. His appeal to the key traditional American values facilitates the achievement of the political goals set by the American president.