Leadership Language in the Course of War: Framing and Reframing Aspects

Abstract

The article presents a multimodal study of leadership language on the example of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s speeches. The work analyzes how coverage of Zelensky's orations constructs frames of the Ukrainian – Russian war viewing. How media (using a mechanism that allows creating a new psychological frame to expand their perception) reframes the outlooks by imposing a specific interpretation onto events. As a result of both textual and visual analysis of Zelensky's video messages, it is evident that to achieve the communicative goal, the President uses a complex system of argumentation schemes (from the sign “argument from the sign”, by analogy “argument by analogy”, cause-and-effect relationship). Numerous strategic and tactical communicative techniques and tools (metaphors, metonymies, epithets, comparisons, allusions, means of stylistic syntax) aimed at creating a frame of Ukraine and shaping its identity allow his speeches to sound clear and convincing.