PSYCHOLINGUISTIC UNDERSTANDING OF A POLITICAL LEADER’S SPEECH INTENTIONS

Abstract

The article highlights the understanding of speech intentions hidden in the political discourse. In order to interact with the audience naturally and smoothly it is essential for a political leader to operate with the intentions of utterances sufficiently.
This paper proposes a psycholinguistic method of speech intention understanding based on President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. The method of a political text study is known as intent-analysis is regarded to be one of the most effective in analyzing political leader’s intentions, ideas and ambitions. The technique uses a political discourse with intention tags to regard the intention of separate paragraphs, sentences or even separate lexical units. The intent-analysis of the research went through several stages from choosing the decisive blocks from the text to analyzing the most influential concepts that made the ideas of the blocks and finished with singling out the key speech intentions and drawing conclusions.
A political inaugural speech analysis has shown that the most beneficial intention lying in Donald Trump’s inaugural speech aims at establishing good relations with bordering countries and the whole world by making his own country and American citizens the most prosperous amongst other nations. The general mood of the political text under discussion is fully optimistic that is found out via semantically positive units.