Characteristics of evaluation in political discourse (based on the speeches of American political figures)

The article examines the evaluation in the political discourse, which, as we know, plays a big role in this type of discourse and is one of the most indicative of its characteristics. Evaluation in political discourse has a number of features. In this article it is investigated in political discourse on the material of the speeches of American figures. The authors analyze the pre-election, inaugural and post-election types of political speeches of Donald Trump and Barack Obama and describe the features of evaluation in political discourse. The article highlights the following characteristics of evaluation in political discourse, such as rationality/irrationality, explicitness/implicitness, categorical/non-categorical and the ways of their expression at the lexical level. The analysis of the material shows that the linguistic expression of one or another characteristic of the evaluation depends on a number of sociopragmatic aspects, such as the type of speech, the linguistic personality of the politician and the topic of the speech.