Winning And Failing Campaign Discourse Strategies

Abstract

The article is devoted to the urgent problem of modern linguistics, namely, the study of the arsenal of communicative strategies implemented in the discourse of political parties of the Republic of South Ossetia during the 2019 election campaign. Pre-election discourse is considered as a particular type of activity in the process of which speech works are generated that actualize the sociocultural context of communication along with extra-linguistic factors. The purpose of the article is to identify victoriously and failed political strategies implemented in the 2019 election campaign based on a comparison with the results of previous parliamentary elections. The authors use speech fragments of speeches, television debates, and statements of leaders and the leading core of the parties that participated in the election race as material. The methodological basis of the study is a pragmatic-cognitive approach that promotes cognitive-discursive analysis, rhetorical analysis, structural-semantic analysis. A pragmatic-cognitive approach reveals successful and unsuccessful strategies for influencing the addressee in the political media discourse, especially during the election campaign. It was established that the main political strategies during the campaign are based on ideologies and party slogans, varying around the central concepts of South Ossetian political communication – “people,” “unity,” and “power struggleThis analysis allows identifying the valid indicator of both the activities of the party represented by the candidate for parliament and the political authority weight of each particular politician. Tactical techniques of pre-election discourse have the most significant impact on the electorate, including and in linguistic and cultural aspects.