Stancetaking as a manipulative resource in political discourse

Purpose. This study uses a corpus of V. Zelensky’s speeches given before foreign parliaments as the basis of a pragmatic analysis and applies to it the stance framework of Hyland. It aims to examine stance-taking as a manipulative strategy and its linguistic realization in Zelensky’s representations of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. More specifically, this study focuses on how the Ukrainian President manipulates stance features in his political rhetoric to control the power relationship with an audience and persuade them into accepting his ideas and policies.

Methodology. 15 Zelensky’s speeches delivered before foreign parliaments were used as materials for the study. The study aims to analyze how stance is realized linguistically in presidential discourse, the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis were applied. Based on the results drawn from the quantitative analysis, pragmatic functions of stance features, speaker’s preferences for these resources and their frequencies in the texts were revealed.

Results. The analysis showed that yet Zelensky used all three types of stance-taking resources – boosters, attitude and self-mention markers, he opted for the latter two ones, avoiding the extensive use of certainty and intensity devices. The article concludes that the strategic use of stance features is of great value to the politician as it helps emphasize or de-emphasize social actions or social actors, enhance credibility, and persuade recipients into believing or doing something.

Research implications. The article specified the concept of stance in relation to political communication and demonstrated that stance features can serve a manipulative purpose exploited by politicians to enhance credibility. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of using stance to study manipulation in political communication.

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