COMMUNICATIVE AND PRAGMATIC PECULIARITIES OF ECONOMIC TERMINOLOGY FUNCTIONING IN ELECTION SPEECHES OF JOE BIDEN AND DONALD TRUMP

Abstract

Politicians carefully plan their election rhetoric, implement their communicative intentions regarding the situation in the country and the target audience through a set of means embodied in communicative activities. Given the importance of the economic component in the political life of the United States and, as a result, the active use of economic terms speeches, the purpose of the article is to study the implementation of communicative intentions of 2020 US presidential candidates through the use of economic terms. The methodology used corresponds to the dominating principles of communicative and pragmatic paradigm in modern linguistics. Methods and principles of corpus linguistics are used to create the studied corpus. The 2020 US candidate speech texts serve as the paper’s research material. AntConc 3.4.4 software has been used to form and process a corpus of 108 election speeches of presidential candidates in 2020 with a total of 242,183 tokens. The lexical search function has contributed to fast detection of the studied units formed at the previous stage by a continuous sample method, and the concordance function has provided an access to their context. Pragmasemantic and contextual analyses are used to identify the communicative and pragmatic load of economic terms in order to identify the impact on the voter within predetermined communicative strategies and tactics. The scientific novelty of the work is in identifying the communicative and pragmatic potential of economic terminology in the system of implementation of communicative tactics and strategies in the structure of election speeches of 2020 US presidential candidates. The analysis of illustrative material has demonstrated that within a correct structuring and appropriate context economic terminology is able to realize communicative intentions. Politicians understood the importance of economic issues during the 2020 campaign, and therefore skillfully used the appropriate units to improve their own image, destroy the opponent’s position and convince the voter of the effectiveness of their political program.