Figures of speech in pre-election agitational texts of print media

Abstract

The article deals with functioning of figures of speech (syntactic figures) in pre-election agitational printed texts, which are viewed as part of pre-election agitational discourse (an independent type of political discourse whose main function is to affect public consciousness). Since expressive language means, particularly tropes and figures of speech, are widely used by today’s mass media as an instrument of influencing and manipulating the public consciousness, it is the journalists’ objective to appropriately choose and correctly position such means in texts, so as to most effectively arrive at the abovementioned goals. Hence, to investigate the dynamics of expressive language means use in agitational texts of print media is an important aspect of studying linguistic features of political discourse. The article aims at analyzing the dynamics of using expressive language means in agitational materials in printed mass media, as well as at investigating functioning of figures of speech of different types in modern pre-election agitational texts. Our reserch of agitational texts created during the first decade of this century and texts written during the last 2-3 year suggests that means of verbal imagery have partially lost their significance, whereas their status of the basic means of verbal influence and manipulation belongs now to syntactic means of creating imagery, namely, to the figures of speech. The most popular figures are the ones most obvious,clear and easily recognized by common people. Namely, they are figures of addition, based on different kinds of repetition (the most commonly used ones are the anaphora and syntactic parallelism) and figures of deletion, based on omission of a sentence component (the most popular one is ellipsis). Besides, it is concluded that figures of speech are not only a linguistic instrument of influence, but also means of structural and compositional organization of texts which the present-day pre-election agitational discourse consists of.

Keywords

• political discourse
• pre-election agitational discourse
• to affect public consciousness
• expressive language means
• figures of speech
• speech strategy
• speech tactics
• anaphora
• parallelism
• ellipsis