Handsome Is As Handsome Speaks

Abstract

The presented work is a multi-year project of defining essential lingual characteristics for building up a Gestalt of a positive political figure. The paper presents research into psychological and linguistic correlations between the social image of a political leader and his/her speech. Our goal is to shed light upon the interdependence of the person’s oratory organization and his/her self-presentation in the eyes of the audience. We believe any human image to be created by a complex integrity of various external and internal factors, such as one’s appearance, clothes and mimics as well as the way one placates one’s inner ego, or social “I” in the process of communication with the audience. Our argument is that the positive image of a political leader is a creative product which is determined not only by a sum total of his/her personal qualities, but is mostly generated from the listeners’ identification of the speaker with an ideal positive image scenario stored in the listeners’ mentality. Hence, this work highlights different conceptions of what being positive signifies for the majority of people and how it affects their taking in and evaluating political leaders in terms of good and bad moral values. The close study of fifty five original political speeches of American presidents dating back from the post-war period to nowadays resulted in singling out the main necessary verbal components of a political leader’s positive image which enable him/her to make a desired impact on the audience.

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Author Information
Iryna Morozova, Odesa Mechnikov National University, Ukraine
Olena Pozharytska, Odesa Mechnikov National University, Ukraine

• Category: Humanities - Language/Linguistics

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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