GRAMMATICAL VARIABLES IN THE SPEECHES OF BARACK OBAMA AND MICHELLE OBAMA

The article analyses grammatical variables in the speeches of the US President Barack Obama and the First Lady of the US Michelle Obama. The following research methods have been used in the article: sociolinguistic analysis and the corpus analysis method (the computational linguistics software WordSmith Tools was used to identify the recurrent elements of political speeches). The above mentioned reasearch methods enabled to reveal the topicality of the research related to linguistic variables (pronouns as grammatical variables) and peculiarities of the US oratorical style. The analysis of speeches revealed that subtle rhetorical communication in the US is related to usage of grammatical variables (use of pronouns). Use of grammatical variables (especially the first person pronoun "we") in the speeches is related to communicative aim to share responsibility with the listeners or readers at the same time, when the usage of other grammatical variables (use of the third person pronouns "he" and "she") signals reference to personal family history, especially in the speeches of Michelle Obama. The need arises to investigate political speeches paying attention to analysis of grammatical and lexical variables in the US political speeches.