Сoncerning linguostylistic features of political discourse (With references to speeches of politicians from Englishspeaking countries)

The present paper aims to identify and rank lexical and stylistic devices according to their frequency of occurrence and compare their functioning patterns in modern English political discourse. The subjects were 6 top British and American politicians. Continuous sampling was used to select the devices from their speeches delivered in 2021–2022. Semantic identification and contextual analysis were used for further data processing. It was found that idioms, metaphors and colloquialisms were the most frequent. Epithets, historical references, special terms, reiterations and parallel constructions occurred much less often, and the least frequent were alliteration, borrowings, quotations from the Bible and similes. Other devices occurred only once or twice. Most of them were common for British and American while others were typically British or typically American. Another finding was the use of a mixture of elements from various styles which might be a technique that helps to build bridges from political discourse to other discourses reflecting the existence of a common pool created for effective interaction of politicians with their electorate.