Syntactic level of the strategy of emotional argumentation in the American electoral TV debate

Abstract

The paper deals with the American electoral televised debate as a genre of political discourse that fully manifests the potential of language as a means of regulating social behavior. A key tool of cognitive-discursive analysis of linguistic persuasion is the concept of communicative dominance strategy. It has been established that communicative dominance can be achieved through argumentation as a means of linguistic persuasion used by the sender to affect the recipient’s mind and psyche at a content-related level. The argumentation can be rational (appeals to the rational sphere of consciousness of the voters) and emotional (draws forth emotional states).

The paper focuses on emotional argumentation as a strategy of the American electoral TV debate that affects emotional and psychological state of consciousness. Using the methods of cognitive linguistics and discourse studies such as semantic-syntactic and syntactic-stylistic analyses, the author has determined a unit of syntactic objectification of the strategy of emotinal argumentation that is called the syntactic emotheme. The paper also contains the classification of syntactic emothemes.