RITUALITY AS A FEATURE OF PUBLIC COMMUNICATION: BASED ON POLITICAL SPEECHES

The article explores the semiotic parameters of rituality as a characteristic feature of public communication, focusing on the material of political speeches and their functioning within networked (online) discourse. The relevance of the study lies in the fact that in the modern world a politician’s personal brand has become an integral part of their public image, and this brand is largely constructed through ritual practices and symbolic actions. In the digital era, rituality acquires new meanings, forms, and manifestations: traditional political ceremonies are increasingly transformed into networked ritual-games embedded in online communication, significantly influencing both individual and collective consciousness. The study sets out and solves several research tasks: identifying the key semiotic components of rituality based on political speeches; describing the ritual character of political communication in offline and online modes; conducting semiotic and linguistic analysis of inaugural practices and speeches of Ukrainian politicians; outlining current trends in the transformation of ritual within networked political discourse and the specificity of its sacralisation and desacralisation. The object of the research is Ukrainian political public and online communication, while the subject is rituality as a complex of semiotic, discursive, and communicative-pragmatic characteristics of political speeches. The methodological basis includes the semiotic approach to political discourse, elements of discourse analysis, contextual-interpretative and component analysis, which allow for identifying symbolic codes of rituality, describing ritual genres, and interpreting their functions and strategies in public communication. The article clarifies the definition of ritual as a symbolic form of social behaviour that systematises the sphere of emotions and proposes an original understanding of ritual communication online as a stereotyped, repetitive, culturally entrenched form of digital interaction oriented not so much towards transmitting new information as toward emotional stabilisation, maintaining social ties, and reproducing shared identity. It is demonstrated that a key distinction between rituality in traditional and networked communication lies in the game component, which facilitates the transition from sacred ritual to networked ritual-game and contributes to the emergence of a burlesque metalinguistic communicative persona as a characteristic subject of contemporary political online discourse. The study outlines the main features and functions of rituality in political communication (formalisation of symbolic actions, ceremoniality, performativity, integrativity, ideologicality, declarativity) and shows how they transform under conditions of online interaction–through memeticity, virality, low entry threshold, gamification, and emotional-psychological support. The conclusions open new prospects for further research into rituality in Ukrainian networked political discourse, particularly in the areas of corpus, multimodal, and interdisciplinary analysis.