Strategy of Self-Presentation of a Politician (Personal and Official Blogs on Twitter of US Vice President Kamala Harris)

Abstract

The issue of invariance of tactics representing the communicative strategy of the politician of the highest echelon of US power in personality self-presentation and status-conditioned discourse is considered. The research material consisted of 349 posts extracted from Kamala Harris’s personal blog on Twitter from January to July 2021 and 665 posts selected from the politician’s official blog during this period. The relevance of such studies is explained by the need to clarify the theoretical and methodological foundations of the analysis of political Internet discourse, taking into account the status of the addressee. The novelty of this research lies in the identification of tactics that actualize the strategy under study on the basis of personality and status-based discourse. The novelty of the work is also due to the fact that the tactics of self-presentation of the politician are studied in a comparative aspect. As a result of the research in personality-conditioned discourse, such tactics as solidarity, appeal, illustration of achievements, gratitude, identification, hypertrophy of the “I-theme” were identified. In the status-conditioned discourse, the authors recorded the tactics of solidarity, appeal, illustration of achievements, gratitude, identification, exaggeration of the “I-theme”, promises. The linguistic techniques that actualize the tactics of selfpresentation in personality and status-conditioned discourse are described.

Keywords

• self-presentation strategy
• self-presentation of a politician
• tactics
• social media discourse
• political internet discourse