SYMBOL SPEAK IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE.
CAMPAIGNING THROUGH LOADED WORDS
Abstract
This paper brings to the fore the investigation on symbolspeak in political 
discourse. Symbolspeak, or deliberate distortion of reality designed via 
manipulation of (visual) language and other symbols, is a ubiquitous semiotic 
production in multimodal meaning making environments such as Electoral 
Campaign Messages subgenre of presidential debates. Following a fine-grained 
conceptualization of symbolspeak via loaded or biased language, the current work 
explores the extent to which Republican and Democrat candidates tend to exploit 
the symbolspeak sub-strategy of loaded semiotic lexicon in the 2020 1st American 
Presidential Debate. A lexical-semantic perspective is employed to identify, analyze 
linguistic symbolspeak representations and expose the legitimation of hidden 
ideologies, values or stereotypes reflected on sociocultural structures.