The Comparison of Lexical and Stylistic Features of Politic Discourse in the USA and in Germany

Key words: political linguistics, political discourse, language manipulation, expressive means of the language, text analysis, mass media style. Political discourse traditionally based on the desire of one or more social group to come to power or hold it on is a complex phenomenon. In this thesis we study political discourse of the USA and Germany analyzing different means of language used in American and German mass media and public speeches. The term “political discourse” is of interest for linguists due to the following reason. Anthropocentric approach came to shift a structured system paradigm, the main principle of which was to study languages from within. Unlike the structured system paradigm, the anthropocentric paradigm allows linguists to take a look at the political discourse from a different angle and to analyze modern texts respecting the linguistic persona. Holding to this stand we studied public speeches held by modern American and German politicians, B. Obama, D. Trump, A. Merkel and others bearing in mind a certain pragmatic aim and a linguistic persona. Such method breeds a new rendering of the political texts and more reasonable attitude to the linguistic and extralinguistic means that contribute to the mind control performed even by Western democracies. In this research we present the analysis of lexical and stylistic means of the articles dedicated to the following important topics – military conflicts, migration and climate change as well as the analysis of the language means of public speeches (informative and sacral speeches). The main output of the work is similarities and differences between American and German political discourses – these results may be relevant to linguists and political analysts not least because U.S.-German relations go through hard times. This is proved by breaking news mentioning tottered “special relationship” between two countries.