ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to an analysis of the political language of party programmes and billboards. As genres of political action, party programmes and billboards represent interesting examples of discourse-constituted and discourse-constitutive mechanisms. Adopting the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) as the method of analysis, the chapter highlights the linguistic and semiotic characteristics of these genres (Reisigl & Wodak 2009; Richardson & Wodak 2013). To exemplify the topic, the chapter examines programmes and billboards used by three political parties in the 2014 parliamentary election campaign in Ukraine. The analysis of billboards (and to some extent party programmes) as multimodal domains involves the study of both images and words. This is in turn connected to an analysis of colours and types of images, as well as the positioning of images and text objects. Similar to linguistic structures, visual structures represent particular experiences and forms of social interaction (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006).
