Studia Filologiczne UJK

Summary

The aim of this paper is to present genological research (literary and linguistic) on the genre of political speech, and to apply the findings to its description.
Firstly, the subject of the presentation is the status of the genre in terms of classical, typology and politics. In the classical context, a text may belong to a given genre only if it has all the parameters that characterise it. In the typological approach which is key to the new genology, the belonging of a text to a specific genre is based on its similarity to a pattern and is gradual. Thie following interpretation the genre, with the reference to the prototype, has dominated modern genology. In my paper I take it as the basis for describing the genres of political speech.
Discussing the history of the speech genre, I recall the works of Michał Bakhtin, according to whom speech genres are patterns of speech. Being a relatively persistent determinant of style and variety, they are the key to text interpretation. I also analyse Stefania Skwarczyńska’s approach in which she presents the postulates constituting the basis for the analysis of each genre using the linguistic method, taking into account the constitutive features of the description of the speech act according to ten parameters. In her research, Skwarczyńska combines a structural and functional approach. Similar models of the genre description are presented by: Aleksander Wilkoń, Jerzy Bartmiński, Stanisława Niebrzegowska-Bartmińska and Maria Wojtak. These researchers use a parametric description of the genre, although each of them differs slightly.