SYMBOL SPEAK IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE.

CAMPAIGNING THROUGH LOADED WORDS

Résumé

This paper brings to the fore the investigation on symbolspeak in political
discourse. Symbolspeak, or deliberate distortion of reality designed via
manipulation of (visual) language and other symbols, is a ubiquitous semiotic
production in multimodal meaning making environments such as Electoral
Campaign Messages subgenre of presidential debates. Following a fine-grained
conceptualization of symbolspeak via loaded or biased language, the current work
explores the extent to which Republican and Democrat candidates tend to exploit
the symbolspeak sub-strategy of loaded semiotic lexicon in the 2020 1st American
Presidential Debate. A lexical-semantic perspective is employed to identify, analyze
linguistic symbolspeak representations and expose the legitimation of hidden
ideologies, values or stereotypes reflected on sociocultural structures.