Maia ALAVIDZE

The paper applies pragmatic theory to investigate strategic inference in political discourse, using examples from speeches by Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. analysing how these leaders use pragmatic mechanisms to convey implicit meanings within distinct democratic contexts. The study applies a framework combining relevance theory, and Gricean pragmatics to explain how contextual factors guide inference in decoding these leaders' ambiguous statements, with particular attention to how institutional settings shape available pragmatic strategies based on the analysis of the transcripts from their speeches, press conferences, and social media interactions. Our findings demonstrate that Trump strategically employs indirect speech acts where declarative statements function as directives, particularly through conversational implicature enabled by phrases like "a lot of people are saying" that facilitate plausible deniability. Zelenskyy, on the other hand, uses sophisticated pronominal shifting between inclusive and exclusive "we" forms, calibrated to specific audiences and contexts. Both leaders exploit pragmatic inference to communicate strong messages to multiple audiences simultaneously while maintaining flexibility in their political positioning. This comparative analysis contributes to our understanding of how pragmatic mechanisms operate in high-stakes political communication, illuminating the complex relationship between explicit content and strategically used implicit meaning across dramatically different democratic contexts. The findings have implications for how political discourse analysis can benefit from pragmatic frameworks when examining strategic communication in contemporary democratic settings.

Keywords: political discourse, pragmatic strategies, relevance theory, Donald Trump, Volodymyr Zelenskyy