Specific and general patterns of deliberative rhetoric in Russian and Anglo-American rhetoric

Abstract

The study aims to identify the verbal and cogitative technology of making proposition (the mandatory compositional part of deliberative rhetoric) in Russian and Anglo-American rhetoric. The paper presents a holistic comparative description of the Patriarch’s speech from A. S. Pushkin’s drama “Boris Godunov” and the “Sinews of Peace” speech by W. Churchill. The concept of the ideal language type taken from linguistic typology served as the basis for the extragenetic comparison of the Russian literary text and the Anglo-American text of mass communication neo-rhetoric. The ideal language type as a set of universal definitions of rhetoric units is formed in classical Greco-Roman rhetoric and is used by the educational systems of both national cultures. The compared texts are constructed according to the same rules and have a single rhetorical orientation. The scientific novelty of the study lies in identifying the sense-making role of metaphor both in the composition of proposition and in the composition of deliberative rhetoric as a whole; in establishing correspondence between the propositions of the Russian and the English-language texts. As a result, the semantic and stylistic features of deliberative oratory in Russian and Anglo-American rhetoric were revealed.