Rhetoric Structure of Soviet Promotional Genre: the Corpus Analysis of Resettlement Brochures of the 1950s and 1960s

This study presents a rhetorical analysis of a corpus of Soviet promotional brochures published between 1952 and 1966 with the aim of incentivizing resettlement on collective farms in different parts of the country. The corpus comprises 21 documents, which account for approximately 166,000 tokens in total. The texts were processed using the corpus manager AntConc. The rhetorical analysis involved identifying frequent lexical bun-dles of 4–6 words in length, with a minimum range of 4 and minimum frequency of 10, and their distribution over different rhetoric moves, or discursive units in cohesion with communicative function. The analysis re-vealed 12 rhetorical moves in the textual structure of the promotional brochure. The moves of Migrants’ testi-mony and New place description are the largest in word volume, while the moves Benefits to migrants and Ap-plication instruction are the most conventional linguistically. According to their rhetorical functions, lexical bun-dles can be divided into three categories: 1) the ones of reference; 2) those of positioning; and 3) discourse or-ganizers. The relative proportion of lexical bundles in rhetoric structures indicate the persuasiveness of the pro-motional text. The results show that ad hom argumentation is minimum, whereas ad rem is frequent and aim to shape the reader’s opinion. The tested method of corpus analysis regarding historical documents can be applica-ble to a broader set of samples, as well as to other types of historical discourses.