Implicatures as speech means in the realization of political discourse strategies

Abstract

The article aims to analyse a declassified telephone conversation between the U.S. President Donald Trump and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The object of analysis is utterances with implications that are studied on peculiarities of the implementation of strategies and tactics in the political discourse. As main characteristics of implicatures, intendability and derivability determine the strategic nature of their actualisation in the political discourse. The strategy of influence is considered the global strategy of political discourse since the main motive of politicians is to expand their electorate. In some areas of the discourse, the global strategy is fulfilled in the local strategies. At the level of speech acts, local and global strategies are fulfilled in speech strategies or tactics that are directly related to the speech characteristics of utterances. American political discourse uses the following strategies of influence: manipulation, subjectivation, populism, fascination, and simplification of information. The manipulation strategy lies in twisting the facts in order to denigrate the opponents. Using the subjectivation strategy, a politician attempts to stand out from the crowd of other politicians. The populism strategy allows a politician to pretend that their main motive is the desire to help people. The fascination strategy aim to provoke strong emotions of the recipient. These local strategies are implemented by tactics of accusation, slander, repetition, opposition, as well as colloquial and emotional-evaluative vocabulary. Corresponding speech devices serve as indicators of conversational implications. Conversational implicatures prevail over conventional ones. The analysed discourse is characterized by chains of implicatures which are used by Trump to manipulate Zelensky.