PRAGMATIC POTENTIAL OF EXPRESSIVE INVERSION IN CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL DISCOURSE: A CASE STUDY OF U.S. PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURAL ADDRESSES

Expressive inversion is a crucial element of modern political discourse, where politicians widely use it to enhance emotional impact and draw attention to key ideas of their political speeches. The aim of the article is determination expressive inversion pragmatic potential in modern political discourse. Expressive inversion draws the listeners’ attention to the part of the sentence that the speaker considers the most important or informative. The relevance of our study is based on the necessity of researching the use of expressive inversion in current political discourse, such as the inaugural speeches of US presidents. This study may also enrich research on the political speeches of American presidents and have some implications for the analysis of political discourse. The research methods of the article combine the discourse analysis method, the style analysis method, the pure sampling method, and the comparative method. In our study, six inaugural speeches by four U.S. presidents (Democrats Barack Obama, and Joseph Biden, and Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump) were subjected to stylistic analysis, with a focus on the use of expressive inversion as a stylistic device. Conclusions. The study has shown that in the inaugural speeches of US presidents, being an essential segment of political discourse, inversion performs not only the so-called universal functions (logical, grammatical, communicative, pragmatic, and structural-semantic) identified by researchers for any text but also expressive, emotional-evaluative, stylistic, and figurative-semantic ones. The style of inaugural addresses created employing inversion fulfills these tasks and brings political discourse closer to journalism and fiction discourse. Intentional change of word order, contributing to the formation of a metaphor or epithet, is aimed at creating a vivid image in the addressee’s mind, evoking emotions and forming evaluative judgments desirable for the addressee. Thus, inversion, performing expressive, emotional-evaluative, stylistic, or figurative-semantic functions, has a powerful cognitive impact, turning it into an effective tool of persuasion. Inversion functions do not appear in their pure form. Instead, they often complement each other, creating a complex layered impact. However, the expressive function is the most frequently used, underscoring its importance in conveying persuasive and dynamic content in presidential speeches. The study focuses on how expressive inversion is used in the inaugural speeches of U.S. presidents. According to the research results, all the US presidents of the 21st century have used expressive inversion in their inaugural speeches. Trump’s inaugural speech had the highest percentage of expressive inversion (25%). The speeches of both Bush’s inaugurals show relatively lower occurrences than the others. The frequency of its use in the presidents’ inaugural speeches suggests the choice of a communicative strategy that defines the purpose of influencing the audience and forms the personal image of the politician. In Obama’s speeches, inversion is the basis of the integration strategy, emphasizing the unity of Americans and the relationship between the people and the government, creating the president’s image as a ‘father of the nation’. Trump uses the inversion to oppose himself to his predecessors, emphasizing the need for radical change, creating the image of a ‘savior of the nation’. In Bush’s speeches, inversion is part of metaphorical constructions that create vivid images of freedom and democracy, forming a strategy of idealization that strengthens the president’s image as the ‘emotional intelligence of the nation’. Using simple syntax and appealing to religious themes, Biden uses inversion as a means of fascination, forming the image of the ‘conscience of the nation’. Thus, in Obama’s and Trump’s speeches, the high frequency of inversion use indicates not only the intention to have an emotional impact or influence the audience’s opinion but also the desire to create a logical chain at the cognitive level, i.e., to form a certain conviction and induce a specific action. The speeches of Bush and Biden are much less full of inversion. Inversion here is only a stylistic component of inaugural rhetoric.