Communicative Characteristics of American Presidential Campaign Commercials: a Diachronic Approach

Introduction. The article identifies trends in the evolution of communicative characteristics of presidential campaign ads as a genre of American electoral communication. The relevance of the study stems from the growing interest in modern linguistics toward analyzing discourse in its dynamics. The scientific novelty lies in identifying strategies and tactics inherent to the discourse of American presidential campaign ads across different historical periods of the genre, as well as describing the historical variability of its emotional-stylistic format.

Methodology and sources. The research is carried out in line with historical discourse studies. The analysis of empirical material, which comprises 499 presidential campaign ad texts with the total volume of 61,497 words, is based on corpus linguistics methods and interpretive discourse analysis. The texts were divided into three subcorpora corresponding to genre development periods shaped by socio-political factors (1952–1972, 1976–2000, 2004–2024).

 Results and discussion. A comparative analysis of subcorpora keywords revealed shifts in the functional focus of utterances produced by key subcategorical types of the campaign ad discourse addresser. The study highlights the transformation of the primary role of the candidate’s supporter as a participant of the discourse: from constructing a positive image of the candidate in the first period to discrediting the opponent in the second period. The growing significance of the discrediting strategy leads to the emergence of a new addresser category in the third period: the opponent’s adversary. It is shown that the tactics of positive self-presentation evolve from appeals to public opinion in the first period to appeals to subjective experience of the addresser in the third one. The increasing role of emotional impact and discrediting strategies in the presidential campaign ad discourse leads to a change in the emotional and stylistic format of the genre, marked by the dominance of the didactic tonality in the first period, informative tonality in the second period, and familiar tonality in the third one.

Conclusion. The communicative dynamics of the American presidential campaign ad genre manifests in increasing agonality and democratization of electoral advertising communication. These trends correlate with declining trust in official information sources, the rise of social media, digitalization of media, and the acceleration and fragmentation of information. Further research into the evolution of electoral communication genres under the influence of these processes is deemed promising.

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