Self-Presentation Strategy and Speech Tactics in Political Discourse (based on the Public Speeches of Latin American Politicians at the UN)

The article is dedicated to the study of self-presentation strategy and speech tactics considered as a communicative strategy aimed at creating a certain image of a politician and changing the conceptual views of the recipients in order to manipulate their consciousness. Implementation of such strategies and tactics can become an effective method to achieve established goals, both state-related and personal. The research material includes public speeches of the Latin American politicians at the 73rd and 77th UN General Assembly. The speeches we analyze are part of the modern Latin American discourse which is defined as ideologically heterogenic with predominant social justice and inequality-oriented approach, expressiveness, and anti-imperialism ideas. The relevance of the present study is determined by the need to clarify the theoretical and pragmatic foundations of the political discourse analysis. For this purpose, self-presentation strategies and speech tactics are studied in comparison. The results show that in the status-conditioned discourse two dominant ideas underlie the self-presentation strategy– “our people”, having a positive axiological status and aimed at changing the views of Latin America’s society as traditionally marginalized, and “we are a victim”, having a negative axiological status, which the politicians use to justify political and economic failures. The speech tactics includes “strong personality”, “appeal to authority”, “appeal to historical documents”, “appeal to constitutive documents”. We have found that the two dominant ideas are made up of some subdominant ideas. These have the same axiological characteristics in the speeches of Latin American politicians which fully corresponds to the historical context of these countries. Thus, the future studies can be centered on studying speech strategies and tactics of personality-conditioned discourse in the respective countries’ media.