Functional-Stylistic Analysis of Pre –Election Campaign Discourse

The paper examines expressive means in D. Trump's and H. Clinton's pre-election discourse, which is considered in syntactic level, the field of the pre-election campaign 2016. Pre-election discourse is a topical direction of modern linguistics as in the period of holding of election campaigns the activity of political figures who use multiple linguistic means aimed at making electors' to come to a necessary decision increases considerably. The analysis is conducted on official websites of both politicians, opened for the elections held in 2016 in the USA. It focuses on the expressive means in the texts of politicians in the first, second and third debates. The study is based on the theory of critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk, 2009), political discourse analysis and the theory of expressive analysis. The structural analysis shows the most wide-spread expressive means functioned in the texts of both politicians. А content analysis is viewed as expressive means (ellipse, reduplication, parceling) of the pre-election discourse to compare the number of expressive means used in both politicians' discourse. The research gives a description and analysis of the expressive means in pre-election discourse.