The thesis is devoted to the research of verbal and nonverbal means of representing economy in the US election discourse from structural, semantic, communicative, pragmatic and functional perspectives.
The study of verbal means of economic representation is based on the corpus of 2012−2020 presidential election speeches (Barack Obama, Mitt Romney − 2012; Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump − 2016; Joe Biden, Donald Trump − 2020) with a total of 1,377,189 tokens taken from websites 4president.org, Ballotpedia, The American Presidency Project. The analysis of non-verbal means is conducted on a collection of more than 170 media texts (250 images in total) from US magazines (Newsweek, The Economist, The Week).
The analyzed theoretical material gives grounds for stating that the election discourse, as a type of communicative activity, consists of speech formations of different nature conveying important socio-political spheres of life and is actualized by verbal and nonverbal means in the election period. An important factor influencing lives of American citizens since the crisis of 2008 is the issue of US economic prosperity. Covering economic issues in their campaign speeches, presidential candidates used economic terminology.
The paper systematizes verbal and nonverbal means of economy representation and establishes that they can have a status of independent and symbiotic units and be combined into communicatively significant enclaves. The analysis of the factual material has showed that the terminological units have a nominative character and are subjected to the general linguistic norms in terms of structural organization and semantic features.
Verbal means are represented by a wide range of economic terms with different structure (one-, two-, three-, four- and five-component units) and word formation models (non-derivatives, affixes, composites, abbreviations). The number of terms-phrases is three times higher than the number of terms-words, which is explained by their greater informativeness and ability to cover complex scientific concepts. It has been found that the presidential candidates avoided using complicated terms, thus the majority of units are three and two-component terms.
It is established that, despite the tendency to unambiguity, stylistic neutrality and accuracy, economic terms are characterized by polysemy, synonymy, neologization, semantic-functional transformation. The pragmatic potential of economic terminology is subordinated to the main goal of election discourse to become the President of the United States of America. Therefore, the politicians have used economic terminology to promote their own image, but discredit the opponent.
The study demonstrates that the representation of the economic sphere is also carried out through non-verbal means indicating the multimodal nature of the media environment. It is revealed that non-verbal components are integral components of multimodal texts and are combined into a number of graphic-visual models on the basis of common features: verbal-photographic, verbal-cartographic, verbal-symbolic, visual-iconic, verbal-illustrative.
The paper substantiates that verbal and nonverbal components correlate in different ways demonstrating complete and partial dependence. It has been found that some graphic images completely duplicate the text information, whereas others supplement it adding to the text additional meanings. In some cases, there is no correlation between the components due to high level of abstractness and complexity of non-verbal modus, which complicates the process of information perception.
Images reflecting economic processes perform a number of the following functions: attractive, informative, aesthetic, symbolic, illustrative, image-creating, characterological, satirical. The analysis of illustrative material has identified a number of stylistic devices used in the structure of non-verbal means (metaphorization, hyperbolization, the play of verbal and nonverbal components, allegory, allusion). Using of non-verbal elements limits the interpretation scope creating a communicative tension and allowing the addressee to implement a certain pragmatically shaped message into a text. Therefore, non-verbal means of economic representation in the American election discourse serve as an effective tool of sharing information and providing manipulative techniques.
