Public Election Address to the Nation: Rhetoric Canons or Avoiding Them?

Abstract

The article deals with election addresses, pronounced by Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton during the election campaign for Presidency in the USA in 2016. The author studies the structural aspect of election speeches of the candidates, the composition of addresses (if it follows rhetoric canons) and the content of each part of the address. Thus, the author of the article combines rhetoric and linguistic approaches. The topicality of the study is determined by the fact that Russian linguists, rhetoric and communication scientists have not covered the subject of American election-campaign speeches structure widely enough. To prove the theoretical statements, the author provides extracts from Donald Trump's Presidential Announcement Speech and 2016 Presidential Policy Agenda of Hillary Clinton. In the conclusion, the author conveys that it is hard to structure D. Trump’s agenda, the address of H. Clinton follows classical five-part model of a public speech. But, as far as it became evident in the 2016 Presidency campaign, H. Clinton’s commitment to rhetoric canons lost out to D. Trump’s appeal to feelings and emotions of the audience.