President’s speech portrait

Abstract

The research of the speech portrait of a politician’s personality in the framework of several linguistic paradigms including pragmalinguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and political discourse contributes to a multidimensional, comprehensive study of this phenomenon, meeting the requirements of the nowadays scientific demands. The appeal to this topic is due to insufficient knowledge of the system of linguistic and pragmatic means that form the speech portrait of modern politicians. The purpose of this paper is to describe the specifics of Barak Obama’s speech portrait during the period of his presidency in 2015-2016. The authors point out that the speech portrait of Barack Obama is formed by multi-level linguistic means, whose use is determined both by the cognitive picture of the politician’s world and peculiarities of the language system, cultural and historical experience of the nation, as well as by the rules and norms of political communication. The paper reveals the specifics of Barak Obama’s implementation of a communicative strategy of positive presentation and self-representation by using a number of speech influence methods. The article offers the linguistic analysis of Barak Obama’s public speeches and their pragmatic specifics that contribute to the detailed and precise creation of a modern politician’s speech portrait.