Registration Number
0825U002180, PhD dissertation
Status
Доктор філософії
Date
21-07-2025
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Title
MOTIVATIONAL PUBLIC SPEECHES: COGNITIVE-DISCURSIVE AND COMMUNICATIVE PERSPECTIVES
Author
Anastasiia S. Skichko,
popup.head Ольга П. Демиденко
popup.opponent Yakiv V. Bystrov
popup.opponent Olga M. Lyntvar
popup.review Larysa I. Taranenko
popup.review Yuliia Karachun
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National Technical University of Ukraine «Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute»
Description
Skichko A.S. Motivational public speeches: cognitive-discursive and communicative perspectives. – Manuscript.
Thesis for obtaining the scientific degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the specialty 035 Philology. – National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”, Kyiv, 2025.
This thesis explores the cognitive-discursive and communicative aspects of motivational public speeches in English delivered by prominent British and American figures who are known for their contribution to various socio-economic and cultural sectors of society. The study is carried out from the perspectives of Cognitive linguistics (CL), Discourse analysis (DA), Functional grammar (FG), and Appraisal theory (AT), with a particular focus on gender- specific issues. The empirical material constitutes the corpus, specifically developed for this research.
Motivational public speeches represent a subtype of public speeches closely related to speeches given on special occasions. Moreover, they, as a distinct genre, exhibit unique structural, conceptual, and communicative characteristics, which demonstrate that motivational public speeches can be regarded as an integral component of motivational discourse.
The cognitive-discursive properties of motivational public speeches are analysed through the theoretical framework of Cognitive discourse analysis (CODA), employing Cognitive linguistics (CL) and Discourse analysis (DA). Built upon these linguistic approaches, the study proposes three schemes for analysing conceptual metaphors and communicative tactics. The first scheme is developed for the investigation of the most prevalent conceptual metaphors, their source and target domains, and axiological features within public discourse. Beyond that, the communicative aspect of motivational public speeches is explored through Functional grammar (FG), another theoretical approach within CODA, which is complemented by Appraisal theory (AT). These approaches form the basis for two additional analytical frameworks aimed to identify communicative strategies and tactics used by public speakers. The second scheme is designed for Transitivity analysis (TA), enabling the exploration of how speakers’ experiences are reflected in participant and process clauses within motivational public speeches. The third scheme framework, grounded in Appraisal theory (AT), seeks to identify and analyse emotionally charged discursive patterns.
Furthermore, investigation of the motivational public speeches required both corpus- driven and corpus-based analyses to accurately obtain the Chi-Square (χ2) statistics, which evaluates the significance of variations in word or feature frequencies across different sections of the corpus. The corpus-driven analysis realised through the Key-Word-In- Context method is used to identify the most frequent word patterns that shape the structure of each motivational public speech, while the corpus-based analysis, conducted using the UAM Corpus Tool, expands the range of tools for manual annotation and data processing.
The results of the study allow us to conclude that in terms of the cognitive-discursive perspectives of motivational public speeches both male and female speakers employ a wide array of conceptual metaphors, particularly structural and ontological ones. The broad range of concepts within the target and source domains that structure ontological metaphors enables the construing of a matrix model of the MOTIVATION concept, which is used to reveal the main ways of its actualisation in motivational public speeches.
Strategically, the motivational speeches under analysis employ a wide range of communicative techniques, which are grouped into two key tactics further viewed through gender perspectives: the tactic of constructing motivational statements, analysed via transitivity patterns in participant and process clauses, and the tactic of motivational statement intensification, examined within the framework of Appraisal theory (AT). The tactic of constructing motivational statements comprises such techniques as the speaker- centered one, the techniques based on thematic focus, audience engagement, gender- specific, and semantic-role techniques in participant-clauses, as well as process-role, active- passive voice, modality, evaluation, and speaker-related techniques in process-clauses. The tactic of motivational statements intensification employs polarity, cohesion, explicitness, valence/axiology, and evaluation techniques.
Registration Date
2025-06-05
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2025-06-05 / 2026-07-01
