Journal of Advanced Research in Social Sciences ISSN 2538-919X ______________________________ * Corresponding author E-mail address: gurevich_ls@mail.ru Cite this article as: Gurevich, L. (2022). Expressive Speech Acts in Political Discourse: An Integrative Approach Perspective. Journal of Advanced Research in Social Sciences, 5(2): 18-35. https://doi.org/10.33422/jarss.v5i2.783 © The Author(s). 2022 Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and redistribution in any medium, provided that the original author(s) and source are credited. Expressive Speech Acts in Political Discourse: An Integrative Approach Perspective Lyubov Gurevich Moscow State Linguistic University, Moscow, Russia ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Keywords: invectives “agonal” signs pragmatic borrowings vulnerable zones of communication political theater The article aims at analyzing of the contemporary political discourse modality that has acquired specific characteristic features of highly emotional utterances based on deliberate or unintended violation of political etiquette principles recently. The article’s generalized theorizing is illustrated by a sample of case study of invectives in political discourse. This analysis aims at distinguishing “agonal” signs (a deliberate use of invectives in speech) and pragmatic borrowings (inadvertent use of invectives) in their functioning, their pragma-semantic characteristics and discursive markers, which helps us in identification of both types of political discourse linguistic items. This research represents an integrative approach combining the Critical Discourse Analysis, the Political Discourse Semiotics Theory, the Role Theory, the Communication Theory, and others, in order to discover the actual reasons and consequences of these changes in the society in general, and in political discourse in particular. 1. Introduction The problem of aggravation of the political rhetoric modality has become urgent recently. It is indicative of a transformative process in the political discourse structure, reflecting the general problem of the institutional communicative norms gradual transformation. The analysis of political discourse rhetoric discovers overabundance of intended and undeliberate invectives and vulgarisms in politicians’ speeches that contradict political etiquette principles of communication. Anyway, the use of aggressive rhetoric has become an integral part of high officials’ communication with each other and the audience. The purpose of this article is to specify some theoretical background, dealing with the speech acts theory, the theory of communication, pragmatics of speech and others, in order to study and explain the ongoing processes in political discourse structure transformation. In order to avoid incomprehension and misinterpretation of the analyzed material, it is reasonable to specify the terminology used in this publication.