Linguocommunicative Grounds of the Cognitive Dissonance and Comic Absurdity in the Rhetorical Presidency

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to identify and analyze in diachrony the linguistic and communicative grounds of cognitive dissonance and comic absurdity in presidential rhetoric, represented by isms, i.e. erroneous, incorrect or absurd from the point of view of rhetoric and common sense statements of US political leaders.

The term «ism» as a hyperonym, which is a generic concept in relation to more particular concepts with a suffix - ism nominating statements, phrases, pronunciations, malapropisms, semantic or linguistic errors present in public speeches of US presidents, is first introduced into scientific circulation within the framework of this study.

An analysis of the context and text content, lexico-semantic and lexico-grammatical features of the speeches of American presidents revealed a tendency to continuously decrease the level of analytical reasoning, literacy and speech correctness with increasing confidence in the sense of the statements of US political leaders themselves.

The results of the study show that close attention and keen interest in the personality of the US president and his rhetoric from the outside, first of all, his compatriots, as well as the world community, lead to this, that the tendency rooted in presidential rhetoric to violate the laws and principles of oratory, escalation of primitive content, simplification of statements, correlated with the presence of a significant number of various kinds of errors and inaccuracies, exacerbated by their replication by the mass public, ultimately leads to a change in mass consciousness, the degradation of analytical thinking, as well as the transformation of generally accepted principles and rules of the English language.