Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly: Genre, Content and Means of Expression

The article considers the genre of the president’s address to the Federal Assembly. The status of the genre is stipulated in the Constitution of the country. The model of the genre is as follows: the sender is the president, the narrow and close addressee – members of the Federal Assembly, the government, the broad and distant addressee is Russian citizens. The address is devoted to the analysis of domestic and foreign policy of the country. The text contains three blocks: ascertaining, evaluative, and prescriptive. The texts of the six messages of 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2020 were analyzed using the istio.com program. Frequency analysis allows us to determine the thematic areas of priority for the addressant.  For instance, in the message of 2020, references to demographics are significantly ahead in frequency of the economic group. In the message of 2018, which was broadcast in the election year, there are units associated with the Soviet past of the country, not represented in other tests. The analysis of the communicative block of the messages allows one to identify linguistic means that the sender considers effective for influencing a wide addressee: pronoun we, verbs to ask, to commit, to believe and modal words with the meaning of duty and necessity.