Strategies and Tactics of the American Electoral Discourse: Corpus Approach

Politicians aspire to achieve the effectiveness of verbal influence, primarily within the electoral discourse. Consequently, people face an acute real-life issue of forming and developing political communication critical analysis skills in order to reveal the hidden ways of speech manipulation. The implementation of communicator’s goals is controlled by the so-called “global intention” or speech strategy. Numerous speech tactics and steps are, therefore, viewed as its narrower components. The research follows the taxonomy, which includes such strategies as manipulation (submission), incrimination (discreditation), self-presentation, self-defense, theatricality, control over the initiative, mobilisation, demobilisation, agitation and hedging. Data for our research corpus was manually collected from the official American presidential debates website debates.org using the continuous sampling method, so that we get more accurate statistics. To make the study up-to-date we have taken the transcripts of all stages of the three most recent debates. Corpus analysis was performed with the aid of the corpus manager AntConc due to the fact that this tool is not only costless but also provides a researcher with all basic functions needed for sufficient results. Debates between John McCain and Barack Obama and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney were only analysed manually, without any software programmes. The results lack statistics compilation and are, therefore, rather subjective. Of the ten strategies studied, only seven might be manifested through some tactics.