Linguocognitive Modelling of the US Election Discourse during the Global Pandemic

Abstract

The research aims to determine the cognitive models used in election campaign speeches by the 2020 US presidential candidates and identify a possible shift in the electorate’s value orientations during the crisis period of the global pandemic. Donald Trump’s and Joseph Biden’s speech corpora, totalling approximately 479 thousand tokens, served as linguistic material for a quantitative and qualitative analysis. The research is novel in that it is the first to identify and analyse the shift of the prevailing cognitive model of the current US political discourse in the light of crisis events. The research findings make it possible to suggest that the shift of the priority cognitive model in favour of the Nurturant Parent Model (with the Strict Father Model being previously dominant) occurred amidst the unfolding global pandemic.

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About this article

Publication history

• Received: December 4, 2021.
• Published: February 28, 2022.

Keywords

• когнитивная лингвистика
• политический дискурс
• предвыборный дискурс
• cognitive linguistics
• political discourse
• electoral discourse

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© 2022 Gramota Publishing, LLC

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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)