Tkhir M. President's Image Creation in Barack Obama's Political Discourse: Linguo-Cognitive and Communicative-Cognitive Aspects

In the dissertation the image of U.S. President Barack Obama is defined by analyzing his political speeches and verbal means of President's image creation in American political discourse in discursive, linguo-cognitive and communicative-cognitive aspects. At the discourse level the complex extralingual context that determines processes of generating and interpreting President's political speeches is discovered, and content and structural peculiarities of Barack Obama's political speeches are singled out. At the linguo-cognitive level the nominative means of President Barack Obama's image creation are systematized, and the topical vocabulary (direct and indirect nominative means) that determines the content of the discursive topically marked contexts is identified. At the communicative-cognitive level the image of President Barack Obama is presented as a set of 16 sense attributes that are formed in the cognitive system of the addressee as a result of the cognitive mechanisms of consonance, dissonance and relevance maximization which function under the influence of the employed communication strategies and tactics verbalized in the discursive topically marked contexts. The model of creating President Barack Obama's image is worked out, and it is aimed at discovering the linguo-cognitive and communicative-cognitive nature of imagemaking. Keywords: image, communication strategy, communication tactic, сognitive mechanism, consonance, dissonance, relevance maximization, sense attribute.