Discursive competence and deverbalization as the main communicative characteristics of modern political rhetoric

The subject of this study is the peculiarities of the selection of linguistic means and the organization of speech utterance in modern American political discourse. The aim is to identify the relationship between the main communicative characteristics of US political rhetoric today: discursive competence and deverbalization. The working hypothesis requiring verification is as follows: public speeches by the American President J. Biden is characterized by a low degree of discursive competence, which is manifested both at the lexical, syntactic and semantic levels of the language. The identification of ways to actualize this characteristic of discourse is the main task of the author of this article. Its solution is carried out through the selection, analysis and interpretation of linguistic means that explicate these parameters of discourse. The characteristics and criteria for identifying the degree of deverbalization and discursive competence of the producer of a speech utterance are determined. The research methods were: observation of American political rhetorical discourse, the continuous sampling method, and interpretative analysis. The novelty of the research lies in the practical application of theoretical concepts defining the communicative characteristics of discourse to the field of political rhetoric, the expansion of the criteria of deverbalization proposed by V. I. Karasik, and the identification of characteristic features of modern political rhetorical American discourse. The conducted research allowed us to confirm the assumption and come to the following conclusions: 1) deverbalization in the speeches of the US political leader prevails over the degree of his discursive competence; 2) the main characteristics of the deverbalization of discourse can be considered its hybridity (mixing of styles), the active use of desemanticized affections (emotive vocabulary that does not carry a specific semantic content), appeal to abstract categories and concepts; 3) the degree of the speaker's discursive competence is determined, among other things, by the quality of the recipient's perception of information, and can be more accurately verified by taking this factor into account.