Attributive hyphenated composites in the electoral speech creativity of American media: Objective and pragmatic causality

The article discusses a two-level causal analysis of the attributive composite formation in the US electoral speech creativity. The research material included attributive hyphenated composites from American mass media sources that covered the US election campaigns of 2016 and 2020. The research methodology integrates the approaches of the functional word formation and morphopragmatics, which focus on the problems of wordproduction in real communication, in live speech, in context, and in discourse. It was proved that the occurrence of attributive hyphenated composites in the electoral discourse of American media could be the result of both objective and pragmatic factors. Objective causality lies in the diachronic typological constants of the English language, the ontological conditionality of the nomination by the hyphen complex, and in the features of modern communication. The reasons for the “contraction” of the polylexemic construction into a functional and structural-semantic whole should be sought in the spiral (bidirectional) model of analytic development of the English language, which was associated with semantic compression, “contraction” and inter-level rearrangement at each new turn. The continuous formation of hyphenated composites is the result of a typologically relevant dialectical interaction between analytic discreteness and a new analogical synthesis. Objective factors include, as well the properties of modern verbal communication with its tendency to spatial-temporal compression, the tendency to thicken and condense information. Pragmatic factors are realized on the basis of objective ones and are expressed in the pragmatically-appropriate compression techniques. Different types of compressive linguistic experimentation are in demand, including “continuum” units that border between different language levels. Attributive hyphenated composites represent the transition “lexeme - syntactic construction” in the structural aspect, and “lexeme - text” in the content aspect, being the content “staplers” of the entire US electoral macrodiscourse. An attributive hyphenated composite with a “language creativity charge” is a technique for realizing the persuasive potential of electoral discourse. The conciseness of hyphenated composites and their ability to convey many pragmatic meanings in a “condensed” form is considered as a manifestation of linguistic creative activity and increasing information capacity.

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