Vol 9, No 1 (2018)

The paper presents an analytical review of publications devoted to the study of political leaders’ verbal image. The research of politicians’ individual discourses belongs to the sphere of linguopolitical personology, which is a relatively new field of Russian linguistics that focuses on the phenomenon of professional linguistic personality in the sphere of politics. The objectives of the review are to specify basic terminology, which is in use, to determine the most popular methods of analysis and research tasks, and to define the boundaries of the considered research area in the context of modern Humanities. The analysis highlighted two main subject areas of linguopolitical personology: presidential discourse study and historical personalities study. The research of political leaders’ proper names in terms of precedent phenomena is also considered to be a peripheral subject area. Each of the identified research spheres is characterized from the perspective of the goal, methods of analysis to be applied and principles of language material selection. We have grounds to believe that the use of a broad approach in defining research boundaries of linguopolitical personology enables to study a vast language material base and to use various methods of study, which in its turn results in increasing interdisciplinary connections of linguopolitical personology and even broader, of political linguistics, with other fields of modern Humanities. Thus, the identified research areas reflect the perspectives of the modern science and therefore, are to provide a multidimensional, comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of professional linguistic personality in the field of political communication.

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.

This article is devoted to the study of German diplomatic discourse as a linguistic phenomenon in the perspective of its translation and transfer by means of semantic transformations from German into Russian. The diplomatic discourse of Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the former German Foreign Minister (2005-2009 and 2013-2017), is used as a research material. As a result of the analysis, the author confirms the hypothesis that modulation is the dominant semantic transformation in the translation of diplomatic discourse, and that the translator of diplomatic texts should pay special attention to clarifying semantic development and concretization, holistic transformation and context synonyms. In addition, the author concludes that such kind of transformation as adaptation is not applied in translating texts of diplomatic discourse.

Precedent toponyms in the political discourse often mean the symbols of the state power: the Kremlin, the White House, Wall Street, Berlin, London, etc. This article is devoted to the analysis of meanings of the precedent toponym “Red Square”. The continuous sampling from the Russian National Corpus, some text fragments from fiction, oral speech and Internet resources were used as the study material. The toponym meaning in the concrete context was determined with the help of semantic analysis aimed at defining of the main seme. The obtained meanings were classified. As a result 16 semantic meanings of the precedent toponym “Red Square” were identified. In the Russian linguistic view of the world the toponym “Red Square” has denotative, connotative, precedent meanings added by the unique associative background. The comprehension and evaluation of these meanings are different in the groups of native speakers and non-native speakers of the Russian language. This toponym has gradually formed the image that has become the marked sign of the world culture possessing its own system of notions and associations. For people studying the Russian language as a foreign language some well known precedent toponyms such as Moscow, the Kremlin, Red Square have only political meaning as the symbols of Russia and the state power. Forming the cultural competence while working with foreign students it is useful to find out the full range of meanings of the precedent toponym.

The article is devoted to the consideration of the modern political cartoons on foreign policy and socially-significant topics in Arabic and French. Political cartoon is a genre of political discourse that entered the scope of linguistic problems in the middle of the 20th century and is an actual problem of modern linguistics. Political discourse has such characteristics as anthropocentrism, multidisciplinarity, expansionism, functionalism and explanatoriness. The genres of political discourse can be characterized as a homogeneous and creolized text; political cartoon is a creolized text that unites iconic and verbal levels and has paralinguistic characteristics. The object of the carried out analysis is the creolized text of the modern Arabic-language and French-speaking political cartoon. The subject of the study in this work was the structural, cultural-specific and linguistic characteristics of the political cartoon text in Arabic and French. The material of the study was selected to be more than 100 cartoons on political topics in Arabic and French. An appeal to the genre presentation of political discourse and comparative analysis of political cartoons is a topical issue of linguistics in the absence of a sufficient number of scientific works touching on this topic. It should be noted that the well-known works devoted to political cartoons use material which is contemporaneous with the author of the study. The study of political cartoon phenomenon in various linguistic cultures is a sphere of the actual multidisciplinary research as the author’s creative beginning at the level of the text and drawing interacts in the political cartoon with the tradition and its genre frames, producing a volume-rich multi-layered creolized text, decoding of which requires the addressee to have the language, logical and extra-linguistic presuppositions and skills of analyzing the political cartoon.

The article is devoted to the research of ideological concept the slavic community in the modern political discourse. The main approaches in interpretation of the slavic community were considered and analyzed here, as well as the invariants of the ideologeme and constituents of its semantic field by means of the method of the frame knowledge representation with the explication of the semantic field constituents. The subject of the research is the ideological concept of the slavic community . The object is the ideological usage of the concept the slavic community in the modern political discourse. The content of the political character with a keyword the slavic community was selected in the system of the “Russian National Corpus”. The theoretical grounds are based on the conception of the slavic community created by the ideologists S. Gradirovsky, E. Ostrovsky, P. Shedrovitsky. The main methods used in the research were: the method of semantic analysis with a cognitive-semantic description of the word semantics, summary and grouping of statistical observation materials. Such type researches are valuable for the political linguistics. As a result the usage frequency statistics in political discourse of variants of the ideologeme the slavic community was compiled, as well as regularities in usage each of its variants were revealed, and the research results were explained.

Due to the genetic proximity of the Russian and Polish languages may seem, that political terms of both discussed languages overlap. Actively complementing the political thesaurus of vernacular with the using of different normative and individual word formation. Contemporary communication is filled, above all, with the language of politics. Therefore, political lexis is made available to all carrier for vernacular. Specialist vocabulary is used, above all, by experts and analysts. Mass media play important role in this process, constituting an effective mechanism of impact on social consciousness. See all the similarities and differences between political terms in Russian and Polish by lexical material and analyzing specific terms. The study’s validity is a poorly developed comparative analysis of Russian and Polish political terminology. The Russian and Polish lexis of the Proto-Slavic origin, in which the meanings were changing, as well as common concepts, which represent different origins with words. The material studied is called political processes, institutions and people. The terminology was collected from Russian-Polish lexicography and mass media texts.