Lexical Repetition as a Resource for Speech Impact in the Discourse of the Spanish Monarch

Abstract

Repetitions in public political discourse are necessary to make a text more coherent, facilitate its comprehension and expand its significance. The article examines lexical repetitions as one of the most effective means of persuasion in Felipe VI’s public discourse and provides their classification in accordance with the semantics of repeated elements, syntactic macro context and pragmatic context. It has been revealed that this means of linguistic expressiveness directly depends on the prevailing historical and modern socio-political context and serves as a tool for implementing communicative strategies and tactics, primarily in public speeches of internal addressing, where it is necessary to actively promote certain ideas and opinions. At the same time, repetitions perform suggestive (to convince the addressee), communicative (to structure information) and expressive functions (to intensify emotional impact). Besides, in the socio-political context (from 2017 to the present), the lexemes with negative emotional connotation are used more frequently and help to carry out the strategy for shaping an emotional state of the addressee. This tendency can be explained by the need to demonstrate, as part of the tactics of appealing to the addressee’s emotions, the participation of the Spanish monarch in the life of the society, especially in times of crisis and instability to reduce the degree of emotional and social tension. Nowadays tautological repetitions of (a) ideologemes describing the state structure, (b) ideologemes of integrative semantics, and (с) pronouns of integrative semantics (such as todos, nuestro, nosotros) play a significant role since they help to promote certain ideas such as the necessity for national unity and the indivisibility of the state.