The role of expressive speech acts in the political image construction (as exemplified on American politicians` tweets)

Abstract

This article analyzes the expressive constructions in the field of virtual communication. Key concepts such as “expressive constructions”, “political discourse”, “political image formation” are considered in the article. The aim of the article is to analyze the language intentions of English-speaking politicians on the basis of the theory of speech acts and corpus linguistics. The conducted experiment was based on the study of expressive constructions as one of the essential aspects used by modern politicians to create an image in the space of virtual communication, namely, in the social network Twitter. This experiment made it possible to identify the most frequent groups of lexical units. All studied lexemes in the process of virtual communication on the basis of Twitter, represented by expressives, contribute to the construction of the political image in the semiotic space of the Internet. The choice of material for the search was chosen due to its availability, relevance, and a wide range of lexical units used for the transparency of material analysis. Tweets of American politicians - H. Clinton and D. Trump, published in the pre-election period were selected by the method of continuous selection. The analysis of tweets has shown that it is possible to identify several functions of expressives, namely, expression of gratitude, joy, congratulations, condolences, apologies and admiration. Most preferable in virtual communication is expressives-gratitude, consisting of verbal lexemes “to thank”, “to be grateful”. It was found that the use of expressive speech acts by politicians contributes to the creation of a positive image, as it helps politicians to express their feelings and emotions, thereby pretending to be courteous, attentive and open for the general audience.

Keywords

• expressives
• virtual communication
• image creation
• twitter
• political discourse