On the national and cultural peculiarities of contemporary Latin American pre-election discourse

Abstract

The focus of the study is pre-election discourse in Latin America, considered as a dynamic system of communication strategies and tactics implemented by subjects of the electoral process, who develop their own communication patterns within the framework of a generally accepted conceptual base oriented towards the national mentality of the electorate. Studying the characteristics of the pre-election discourse of Latin American politicians, given its roughly identical and generally accepted strategic and genre spectrum, requires focusing on the choice of tactical techniques and themes of speeches that ensure the most effective impact on the local electorate. Moreover, during an election campaign, the political identity of a Latin American politician is clearly manifested at the level of his idiostyle, which involves a set of linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical means that participate in the formation of his image and are associated with a unique set of key ideologemes, concepts, individual metaphors, precedent names, as well as a special syntactic construction of statements. The article attempts to systematically understand the national and cultural characteristics of Latin American pre-election discourse (taking into account their projection onto the invariant structure of electoral communication as a whole). These characteristics, however, can be expanded upon for each specific political figure, allowing for an assessment of the peculiarities of unconventional communicative behavior depending on the election campaign scenario.

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