Linguistic Aspects of Political Discourse: Framing, Ideology, and Persuasion in Contemporary Public Language

Abstract

Politicians rarely say things by accident. Word choices, metaphors, and even small pronoun shifts are deliberate tools for shaping how audiences understand political reality. This article examines the main linguistic strategies at work in contemporary political discourse, drawing on a mixed-method analysis of campaign texts in English (2010–2023). Combining Critical Discourse Analysis, corpus methods, and Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the study identifies three recurring patterns: evaluative vocabulary tied to ideological positioning, systematic use of war and journey metaphors to frame policy, and strategic pronoun switching — especially "we" — to build solidarity or exclude opponents. Effective speakers, the analysis shows, tend to pair syntactically simple sentences with conceptually dense metaphors rather than relying on complex clause structures. The findings carry practical implications for media literacy, political communication pedagogy, and plain-language policy.