Zheltukhina M.R. Sporova I.P.
MANIPULATIVE INFLUENCE OF THE EMAIL SUBJECT LINES IN THE AMERICAN POLITICAL DIRECT EMAIL
Abstract. Modern information and communication technologies are rapidly shifting various types of communication to virtual environments. Election campaigns in some countries are characterized by the use of new methods to attract voters’ attention, which in turn leads to the emergence of new hybrid genres of political media discourse. This article examines the email subject line as a structural component of political direct email. The aim of the study is to study the manipulative influence of email subject lines related to the new genre of political media discourse, achieved by applying methods such as discursive, contextual, linguopragmatic, system-linguistic and interpretive analysis. The study is based on the analysis of 500 email subject lines from the political direct email corpus sent to US residents during the 2016-2022 election campaigns. The findings suggest that email subject lines have significant potential to manipulate recipients’ minds, despite the lack of a direct correlation between a political email subject line and its content. Graphic (capitalization), lexical (eponymy, a combination of lexical units of different styles, military metaphors), and syntactic techniques (appeals, imperative mood) contribute to manipulative influence on recipients.
Key words: political media discourse, Internet discourse, media genre, political direct email, email subject line, metaphor, influence, manipulation.