Kononova I.V., Melnichuk T.A. Dynamics of Values in American Election Discourse
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2021.4.9
Inna V. Kononova
Doctor of Sciences (Philology), Professor, Department of English Philology and Translation, Saint Petersburg State University of Economics
Griboedov Channel Emb., 30-32, 191023 Saint Petersburg, Russia
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https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4903-5856
Tatiana A. Melnichuk
Associate Professor, Department of English Philology, M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University
Belinskogo St, 58, 677000 Yakutsk, Russia
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8126-0925
Abstract. The article presents the results of a corpus-based analysis of axiological characteristics of political discourse. Applying the method of identifying keywords in a corpus the authors described the dynamics of the American election discourse dominant values in the period from 1952 to 2016. The research material comprised the texts of American presidential election commercials from seventeen campaigns. The texts were compiled into three corpora according to three historical periods: period I – 1952–1972; period II – 1976–2000; period III – 2004–2016. It was found that the invariant values represented in the texts of election commercials of all the historical periods are: "prosperity", "patriotism", "progress", "social justice" and "security". The listed values receive a variable linguistic expression in the texts of each period. It is shown that the evolution of the value component in the presidential campaign discourse manifests itself in the change of actors within the opposition "us – them", in variation of their linguistic representations, in modification of value dominants of discourse and in transformation of language means conveying evaluative meaning. The main set of value orientations of the discourse remains relatively constant, the changes are revealed in the model of conceptualization of the values and their influencing potential in the election communication.
Key words: discourse, election discourse, axiological characteristics of discourse, key words, corpus linguistics, value.
Citation. Kononova I.V., Melnichuk T.A. Dynamics of Values in American Election Discourse. Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriya 2. Yazykoznanie [Science Journal of Volgograd State University. Linguistics], 2021, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 113-125. (in Russian). DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2021.4.9
Dynamics of Values in American Election Discourse by Kononova I.V., Melnichuk T.A. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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