Linguistic studies of political media discourse

Abstract

The paper provides an overview of the main trends in the study of the Russian political media discourse. Three stages in the development political media linguistics in Russia are identified. The first two phases developed as part of functional stylistics. The first saw the establishing of the space distribution and the major features of the social and political discourse, the identifying of linguistic resources role in the expression of these features, and the defining of avenues of typological study. The second stage involves analyzing the speech and genre in the structure of social and political discourse and highlighting the constitutive stylistic features of each of the dedicated text types. The third stage — actual media linguistics — is associated with the development of a comprehensive praxeological approach, in which political discourse is considered as space for political action. For this analysis techniques developed in different areas of communicative linguistics are used. The analysis reveals the linguistic expression in the discourse of actors in political life, political relations between them, shows how the genre structure of the media discourse “adapts” to reflect the ongoing political analysis of reality. As a result, the author concludes that the political discourse has become for researchers the field upon which the formation of almost all domestic communication-oriented linguistics takes place.