• Abbas Lutfi Hussein

  Author

Slogans have been always taken as an important part of political elections throughout the world.
Election campaign slogans are words, phrases or even sentences that are manipulated to influence
meaning in various ways. Although they are mostly incomplete sentences, their meanings appear to be
somehow straightforward and explicit. Then, there must be certain features that these slogans enjoy
which make them being accepted by both their receivers (audience) and senders (candidates).
Providing the basic definitions of slogans in general and election campaign slogans in particular, the
focus in this paper ,however, would be on the most prominent linguistic ( syntactic and semantic ) and
aesthetic characteristics of the 21st century American and Iraqi election campaign slogans . Points of
similarity and difference between them would be shown. It has been found that both American and Iraqi
slogans employ declaratives for informative and expressive functions of language, and imperatives for
directive functions. Nevertheless, the American election campaign slogans seem to be shorter and more
musical (aesthetic) than Iraqi ones.

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