Ukrainian president Zelenskyy’s speeches to neighboring states’ parliaments: media rhetorical perspective  

Abstract.

UKRAINIAN PRESIDENT ZELENSKYY’S SPEECHES IN THE NEIGHBORING STATES’ PARLIAMENTS: MEDIA RHETORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Serhiy Potapenko

Department of English Philology and Language Philosophy, Kyiv National Linguistic University, Kyiv, Ukraine.

Abstract

Background: The notable feature of the Ukrainian war discourse is President Zelenskyy’s domestic and international speeches. The latter have been discussed so far from the perspectives of their effectiveness, news transformations, the use of particular linguistic units. A special category of international speeches are meant for the neighboring states’ parliaments: they are aimed at forming a supporting in-group of an immediate kind.

Purpose: The aim of this paper is to study the way President Zelenskyy influences the parliaments and population of the neighboring states.

Results: The persuasive potential of President Zelenskyy’s speeches to the neighboring states’ parliaments rests on appeal to human needs subordinated to pathos and to cultural arguments related to logos. The speeches evoke human needs of belongingness, safety threat and safety renewal while the cultural arguments are represented by collective values covering opinions of particular countries’ leading politicians and events similar to those occurring in Ukraine. The main linguistic means of evoking human needs and cultural arguments are morphosyntactic constructions treated as any fixed combination of form and function or form and meaning entrenched into human long-term memory.

Discussion: The delivery of the speeches to the parliaments of the friendly neighboring states about a month apart from each other reflects their role in assisting Ukraine: Poland which hosted an enormous number of refugees in the first days of the invasion; Romania and Slovakia which became helpful at later stages. However, there is no address to Moldova since being in need of defense itself it cannot help Ukraine. One can also find an address to the Belarussian people instead of the authorities.

Keywords: speech, cultural argument, human needs, media rhetoric, morphosyntactic construction, President Zelenskyy.

Vitae

Serhiy Potapenko is Doctor of Philology, Professor of the Department of English Philology and Language Philosophy, Kyiv National Linguistic University. Research interests: discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, media linguistics.

Correspondence: sehiy.potapenko@knlu.edu.ua 

Article.

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