The Rhetorical Potential of Linguistic Personality in Contemporary Discourse

The article examines the rhetorical potential of linguistic personality as a dynamic discursive capacity that becomes visible in the selection, organization and strategic deployment of linguistic resources under specific communicative conditions. Rather than treating rhetorical competence as a fixed inventory of expressive devices, the study conceptualizes it as an interaction among verbal-semantic mastery, conceptual framing, pragmatic intention, audience orientation, self-presentation and genre flexibility. The theoretical basis combines the linguistic-personality model developed in Russian linguistics with discourse analysis, argumentation theory, ethos studies and research on computer-mediated communication. The analysis identifies five interrelated dimensions of rhetorical potential: verbal-semantic, cognitive-framing, pragmatic-strategic, ethotic-interactional and digital-modal. Particular attention is paid to contemporary discourse environments in which speakers and writers must simultaneously construct credibility, anticipate heterogeneous audiences, adapt to compressed and multimodal formats, and manage the circulation of utterances beyond their original context. The article argues that rhetorical effectiveness is produced not by linguistic richness alone, but by the ability to coordinate linguistic choice with social role, communicative purpose, discursive norms and expected perlocutionary effect. The proposed model offers a framework for analysing public, media, academic and digital discourse and clarifies why the modern linguistic personality should be studied as an adaptive, reflexive and ethically responsible subject of communication.