The Language of Political Slogans in 2016 Slovak Parliamentary Elections
The Language of Political Slogans in 2016 Slovak Parliamentary Elections

Summary/Abstract: This research focuses on the investigation of political slogans produced during the 2016 Slovak Parliamentary Elections. Slogans were collected from street advertisements, such as billboards and posters, in the town of Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. The pool of slogans was processed through several linguistic methods, such as semantic, morphemic, stylistic, and axiological analyses, which helped to reveal the linguistic design of political slogans on the one hand, and some of the features of regional political environment on the other. In terms of their semantic content, the largest share of slogans contains a promise to create more jobs and improve social welfare. Theaxiological vector of slogans aims at patriotism, honesty, and justice, whereas politics is dismissed as something primarily harmful. Grammatically, most slogans employ 1st person plural (e.g. we do smth, let’s do smth) as their predominant choice of verb form, which signals that the candidates in the election tend to speak as a group and inspire people to join in a certain activity rather than address the electorate through more direct verb forms (1st person singular). Conducted synchronically on a small scale, this research presents a local perspective on the elections in question. If conducted on a continuous basis in several Slovak regions, however, this investigation may serve as a sensitive indicator of any changes in the social and political environment nation-wide.

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