Speech strategies and tactics in election discourse of Russian governors (exemplified on Telegram-channels)

Language persuasion in political discourse is an increasingly important area of research nowadays. Scholars pay plenty of attention to describing speech behaviour in terms of communicative strategies due to the need for their proper integration into political speech, especially in the context of the crisis. A considerable amount of literature has been published on the topic of presidential election communication. However the governors’ discourse has received relatively little academic interest. The purpose of the present study is to identify language markers of the most frequent speech strategies in the pre-election discourse of Russian governors. The current study combines both content and intent analysis techniques in order to extract specific language features and detect intentions found in the speech of politicians. The research project might result in the detailed estimation of speech persuasion strategies that appear in the governors’ discourse and the most frequent will be described in the form of language models.