| Abstract [eng] |
The goal of the present research was to describe the peculiarities of argumentation technique in Russian and Lithuanian Presidents’ (Vladimir Putin and Valdas Adamkus, respectively) annual speeches covering the period of 2000-2007. In attempt to achieve the goal of the research, the following objectives have been pursued: a) what cognitive structures operate in particular argumentation, b) how the elements of argumentative discourse are realized (i.e. the ways of introducing a thesis statement into the text; the content and volume of arguments supporting the thesis). The methods employed are cognitive analysis (to distinguish the speaker’s structures of the conscious in attempt to generate an ideological text), logical-rhetorical analysis (to imply logical and illogical ways of persuading) and contrastive method (to examine and compare the findings). The novelty of the research lies in the fact that the research question has not been analysed in depth so far, i.e. neither the research subject (the issue of argumentation in Lithuanian political discourse has not received much attention yet), nor working out the methods of argumentation analysis (effective methods of argumentation analysis in political discourse have not been fully developed so far) were much of linguists interest. The claims of the dissertation: 1. Presidential annual speeches seem to be a hybrid type of a speech act which incorporates the qualities of descriptive, evaluative and argumentative speech acts. 2. The thesis of the presidential annual speech is not explicated. Rather, the listener is introduced to it by inductive reasoning: summarizing arguments-examples. 3. The realization of cognitive structures is an element of argumentation discourse of presidential annual speeches. 4. The cognitive structures of presidential annual speeches correlate with the cognitive structures constituting the deep layer of public political texts. |
