Ukrainian Institutional Political Discourse in a ‎Communicative–Cognitive Aspect

Abstract

This study analyzes the communicative behavior of politicians and the features of the Ukrainian-language political discourse implementation in the political space of Ukraine. This work studied about 8,000 microtexts taken from the political texts of Ukrainian politicians such as Poroshenko, Tymoshenko, Yanukovych, and Yushchenko for the period between 2004 and 2018. The selected microtexts were then analyzed using general scientific methods and structural semantics, linguo-communicative and discourse methods, and quantitative and qualitative analyses. The results demonstrated that in the Ukrainian-language political discourse, the binary opposition “own↔alien” is employed for manipulative influence and various cognitive scenarios. On the basis of the communication features of each of the interviewed politicians, we managed to determine that Ukrainian politicians adhere to four types of communicative behavior: conflict (Tymoshenko), conflict-neutral (Yushchenko), conflict-cooperative (Poroshenko), and cooperative-conflict (Yanukovych). The study enabled determining the features of the Ukrainian-language political discourse and the political space of Ukraine and characterizing the tiers of the communicative behavior of politicians in modern Ukraine.

Keywords

• political discourse
• institutional discourse
• ukraine
• cognitive scenarios
• communicative behavior