Battle of words – analysis of election slogans from the campaign to the Sejm and the Senate of 2019

In the paper Battle of words – analysis of election slogans from the campaign to the Sejm and the Senate of 2019 Albert Guziak conducted an analysis of the official slogans and selected secondary election catchwords used by political parties during the last election campaign to the Polish parliament in 2019. The collected material was examined from the political-linguistic perspective, according to which the author focused on linguistic aspects (used lexis, methods of argumentation, grammatical modifications made) and political science criteria for the evaluation of election slogans (taking into account the effectiveness of the message, assessing the placing of the usage use of election slogans into the context of the ideological profile of a given political group and from the perspective of the social economic reality accompanying the election campaign of 2019). The aim of the paper is to try to define the specificity of slogans used for persuasive purposes in one of the most important domains of political activity i.e. the election campaign. The first part of the title – “Battle for words” – of the chapter was consciously chosen by the author to emphasize the ‘militaristic’ and aggressive nature of the use of language in election campaigns. By selecting and analyzing authentic election slogans, the author wants to capture the most important elements and features that characterize election slogans; to this end, he confronts the collected linguistic material with theoretical studies on political slogans, e.g. Marek Koch's work: Slogany w reklamie i polityce (Slogans in advertising and politics), as well as the study: Język marketingu politycznego w kampanii wyborczej ’97 (The language of political marketing in the '97 election campaign) by Aneta Banasik