The study brings to light the communicative and interactional parameters of the verbalized category of dominance taking into account semantic and pragmatic features of the corresponding utterances. The approach adopted to dominance in this research is to see it as a contextually sensitive phenomenon, as a set of linguistic resources and discursive actions which are available to speakers and which can be used more or less successfully depending on the power relations between them and the speech situation they are in. From this perspective, dominance is accomplished in discourse both on a structural linguistic level and on interactional conversational level. In other words, dominance is viewed as a dynamic sociolinguistic category of interactional nature, which emerges in the interplay of the participants' locally constructed discursive identities and their institutional statuses. More specifically, this paper deals with a study of structures, strategies and other properties of text and verbal interaction playing a role in the modes of dominance reproduction. The issues are considered in the theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis, which focuses on the analysis of complex relationships between dominance and discourse. Chapter one, "Communicative and Sociolinguistic Aspects of Dominance in the English Political Discourse", introduces the key concepts, which underpin the theoretical and analytic approach adopted. Political discourse is approached at the angle of its genre constitutive properties, i.e. considering its argumentative and persuasive aspects. The characteristic features of power and dominance are established: unlike power, dominance is embodied in subtle, routine, everyday forms of text and talk that appear natural and acceptable to recipients. Dominance is defined as a dynamic interactional category of a sociolinguistic and pragmatic nature, the latent resources and potential power properties of which are realized in the participants' discursive actions. The research is further structured according to two types of dominance - interactional and rhetorical. Conversational specificity of dominance in the dialogic interaction of political debates is analyzed in chapter two, "Interactional Dominance". The contextual approach to political discourse of presidential debates is elaborated; cognitive context models as a set of rules and conventions for the stereotypical communicative situation are suggested. It is shown that realization of dominance in a given situation is constrained by the institutional and formalized structure of political debates. Markedness / unmarkedness of interactional dominance depends upon deviations in the participants' verbal behavior from the prototypical cognitive-interactional models. As a result of the stimulus-response analysis of adjacency pairs, the following initiatives as dominant interactional actions were outlined: stimulating initiatives, controlling initiatives and constraining initiatives. Their linguistic representation is considered in detail. In chapterthree, "Rhetorical Dominance", pragmatic and semantic peculiarities of dominance are analyzed. It is shown that linguistic mechanisms of argumentation enable politicians (speakers) to achieve their communicative goals and to satisfy their political ambitions by gaining rhetorical dominance. The textual structure of political debates is inseparably connected with the cognitive structuring of the future president model in the mental systems of the listeners. These conceptual models are based on the primary axiological opposition of the political debates discourse: WE :: THEY POSITIVE :: NEGATIVE The main communicative strategies of rhetorical dominance are based on this opposition: the strategy of positive self-presentation and the strategy of opponent's negative presentation. Linguistically, these strategies are realized explicitly and implicitly by means of semantic rearranging of information according to the following strategic steps: emphasizing the positive information about oneself, emphasizingthe negative information about the opponent, concealing negative information about oneself and concealing positive information about the opponent. Such manipulative emphasizing is realized in repetitions, parallelisms, contrasts, comparisons, cleft- and pseudo-cleft sentences. Realization of rhetorical dominance strategies corresponds to the manipulative rearranging of the semantic roles, namely, the preferential realization of the discursive referents in Agent roles. Manipulative usage of pronouns is another linguistic means of realization the rhetorical dominance strategies. Their pragmatic meanings of inclusivity and exclusivity are given special attention, as they play an important role in reproduction of dominance versus solidarity.
