Ecological discourse in American politicians’ speeches

The present study investigates interdiscourse interaction of political and ecological discourses which operate as including and included functional genres. The analysis of intersection is carried out within pragmalinguistics applying universal instruments of discourse analysis to fragments of political and ecological discourses in the periphery and is based on public speeches and statements of American politicians. Methods of contextual, cognitive and stylistic analyses are also used. The research reveals and describes three aspects of ecological discourse functioning within political genre. First, an inherent link between ecological and economic discourses is stated. Second, it is proved that including political discourse defines stylistic peculiarities, the utterance on the subject of ecology is represented by the means characterizing political genre and having high pragmalinguistic potential: the use of many stylistic devices, emotionally charged vocabulary, the presence of «friend-foe» opposition which is most often realized by deixis means: deictic pronouns, local toponyms and time-space markers are typical. Third, the representation of the same concepts «money», «job», «business», «progress», «crisis» in the utterances of different speakers is discovered. Political discourse defines and forces the actualization of these concepts in fragments of included genres and concepts receive new senses according to their linking roles for several types of discourse practices and ability to actualize fully in thematically different spheres.