Lexico-grammatical properties of dysfemisms (on the material of political discourse)

Abstract

The virtual image of political mediareality that reflects modern political systems functioning in mass media heavily influences people consciousness, this is why the research is getting more and more relevant nowadays. The subject of the research is dysphemia - one of the lexical means of such influence that fulfils addressee communicative intentions. Though euphemia that is being opposed to it is widely presented in linguistic literature, dysphemia has not known any systemic analysis currently. The scientific novelty of the work is to establish the lexico-grammatical nature of dysphemisms, to reveal their morphological structure, to selectively classify dysphemisms, and to analyze functional-grammatical transformations of dysphemisms in different types of political discourse. The lexical-stylistic definition of dysphemism was proposed in the work, taking into account its pragmatic functions and priority areas of functioning. The principal difference between the use of dysphemisms in colloquial speech, journalism, and the political media discourse is shown. The central object of consideration was the most important characteristic of dysphemia - its lexico-grammatical aspect. In the article a consistent analysis of dysphemisms of various partial affinities on the extensive text material is carried out: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, particles, interjections and onomatopoeic words. As a result, it was established that in the political discourse, dysphemisms-nouns are mainly used as dysphemisms. Special emotional-evaluative content is given to proper names - anthroponyms (including nicknames) and toponyms (comonims). Allowing high variability specific nouns realize the dysphemistic function more often than nouns of other categories. In discrediting strategies, the adjectives of all three categories are also frequent: qualitative, relative, possessive. Dysphemistic activity of qualitative adjectives was noted. Relative adjectives, as a rule, perform a dysphemistic function in the composition of phraseological phrases. An increase of the dysphemistic effect in two-word composites “dysphemism-adjective + dysphemism-noun” was revealed. The forms of the verb with the semantics of the state, of the active action and of the result of the action are actively disfigured. Particles, interjections and onomatopoeia realize the dysphemistic function extremely rarely. Author’s neologism, grammatical transformations, occasional ways of word formation greatly expand the dysphemistic repertoire and the corpus of the dysphemistic denominations of the Russian language, constantly enriching the research material, supporting the scientific and practical interest in such a relevant phenomenon of language and speech.

Keywords

• политический дискурс
• дисфемия
• дисфемизм
• лексико-грамматическая природа дисфемизмов
• грамматические трансформации дисфемизмов