PUBLIC SPEECH AS A SPEECH GENRE OF RITUAL POLITICAL
COMMUNICATION: TRANSFORMATION OF NEW YEAR’S
SPEECHES IN THE UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL RHETORIC Cover Image

ПУБЛІЧНИЙ ВИСТУП ЯК МОВЛЕННЄВИЙ ЖАНР РИТУАЛЬНОЇ ПОЛІТИЧНОЇ КОМУНІКАЦІЇ: ТРАНСФОРМАЦІЯ НОВОРІЧНОГО ЗВЕРНЕННЯ В УКРАЇНСЬКІЙ ПРЕЗИДЕНТСЬКІЙ РИТОРИЦІ
PUBLIC SPEECH AS A SPEECH GENRE OF RITUAL POLITICAL COMMUNICATION: TRANSFORMATION OF NEW YEAR’S SPEECHES IN THE UKRAINIAN PRESIDENTIAL RHETORIC

(case study of Petro Poroshenko’s new year’s speeches)

Author(s): Natalia V. Kondratenko
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies
Published by: Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza
Keywords: political discourse; speech genre; New Year’s speech; presidential rhetoric; genre dynamics

Summary/Abstract: The article sets out to investigate one of the speech genres of political discourse —New Year’s greetings as a verbal representations of ritual political communication. The structural andcompositional, semantic and linguistic and pragmatic features of New Year’s greetings are determined.The dynamics of New Year’s appeals to the Ukrainian people in the presidential rhetoric of PetroPoroshenko is traced out. The article aims at tracing main trends in the genre of New Year’s greetingreflected in the speeches of the actual Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, this aim leading to thefollowing objectives: to determine structural and semantic features of the genre of New Year’s greetings,to analyze texts of greetings and to follow the main modifications of the genre at the level form andcontent. The corpus of the study comprises texts of New Year greetings by Petro Poroshenko for theperiod from 2015 to 2018. It is proved that New Year’s greetings are based on the three-componentstructure with the fixed order of the following parts: retrospective, prospective and optative; in ritualformulas they contain names of addressees according to their nationality, family ties and statehood;semantic focus is on characterizing the current situation in the country and promising positive changes inthe next year; lexical markers of the conceptual core of the speeches are tokens “Ukrainian”, “unity”,“people” and “development”. We observe a tendency to increase the retrospective part and decreasethe prospective one; giving preference to nominations on national and state grounds; domination ofpatriotic ritual formulas and patriotic content; the strengthening of religious semantics, in particularChristian; reduction of international components and orientation towards European politics; propensityto positive evaluations; strengthening speaker egocentrism.The problems of conceptualization,semantics and linguistic pragmatics of New Year’s greetings are presented, generalizations on thegenre dynamics of New Year’s appeals in the political discourse are elucidated.

  • Issue Year: 8/2020
  • Issue No: 01
  • Page Range: 85-94
  • Page Count: 10
  • Language: Ukrainian
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