TOXIC POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN THE UNITED STATES AND UKRAINE: COGNITIVE AND DISCOURSIVE CONTRASTS

Abstract

This paper represents a comparative study of cognitive and discursive contrasts in toxic political discourses in the United States and Ukraine. Toxicity is the perception of the behavior of a political figure that causes moral harm or discriminates against the addressee; it is characterized by radical trends in politicians’ and influencers’ worldviews to the right or left being the result of assigning the attribute "toxic" to representatives of opposing socio-political groups. Politicians’ utterances are toxic if they are aimed at destroying the beliefs and preferences of the opponent with harmful consequences for his/her personality or image. The study is based on videos of speeches delivered by American (Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Ann Coulter) and Ukrainian (Iryna Herashchenko, Oleh Liashko, Iryna Farion, Illia Kyva, and Oleksii Honcharenko) politicians labeled as "toxic" in the media. The paper is aimed at identifying common and distinctive means of verbal and nonverbal expression of toxicity in the speeches of American and Ukrainian politicians. The verbal markers of toxicity include the politicians’ explicit use of ideological, national, gender-related and other utterances that demean another person and discriminate against him/her. The nonverbal markers of toxicity encompass the manner of speaking (aggressive, loud, fast, screaming, hysterical, ostentatious, exaggerated) and his/her kinesics (tense movements and posture, clenched fists, impulsive gestures and head movements, exaggerated body movements and facial expressions, eyes, grimacing). The contrasting feature of the toxic speech behavior of American politicians is discriminating racist and sexist statements, which are conceptually related to the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements and explicate ideological and gender-related toxic thematic zones. Toxic themes in Ukrainian politics ignore gender-related issues, but focus on the conflicting ideological national-patriotic block of concepts (“Ukraine above all”, “Ukraine is not Russia”, “colonial status”, “language issue”). The commonality of the political discourses of the United States and Ukraine is the aggressive-emotional type of toxic politicians, whose speech is characterized by confrontational tactics of accusations and insults of the opponent, as well as active involvement of impulsive gestures and head movements, exaggerated facial expressions and aggressive speech to kinesically enhance verbal toxicity.