THE USE OF LANGUAGE AS A MEANS OF RHETORICAL ARGUMENTATION IN POLITICAL SPEECHES

Abstract. The role played by politicians in today’s global society is extremely important. Politicians` words, their speeches determine the role of the country in the international arena, form the image of the state in the eyes of the world community, and determine the current and future political situation in the state itself and beyond. For every politician, it is essential to use properly various means of persuasion including rhetorical argumentation. The objective of this research is to identify the ways of expressing rhetorical argumentation by means of language. As the goal of rhetorical argumentation is to make the audience accept the point of view of a politician it is clear that this can be only achieved by means of language. After the analysis, it has become clear that these means can be represented on three levels: lexical, syntactical, and stylistic. In our research, we have used several methods among which the main one is the method of pragma- linguistic analysis. It allowed us to analyze the possibilities of the use of language units as means of expressing the speaker`s intentions. We have also used semantic analysis of lexical structures to understand specifics and contextual meaning of the chosen words, functional- semantic analysis that allowed us to study the functions of certain grammatical structures, and stylistic analysis to examine an emotional impact of language means on the audience. The results of this work may help to predict future actions and intentions of the politician, which can be useful in the field of diplomacy and international relations. Moreover, they can help to identify the most productive ways of influencing the audience, which can be used not only in political discourse but in publicistic discourse as well, e. g. in the area of speechwriting.

Keywords: rhetorical argumentation, political discourse, language means