“Nobody Asked You to Nicker” – Monstration Slogans as a Speech Genre

Abstract

The paper analyses the slogans of “Monstration”, a manifestation that was held for the first time in Novosibirsk in 2004 and has become an important social and cultural event in many other Russian cities as well as in some other countries. The corpus compiled by the author includes about 4000 slogans and allows, basing on the theory of speech genres, to highlight the main topics and structural features of this type of texts and to identify their similarities and differences with the slogans of political manifestations. The study proves that Monstration may be considered as a form of “linguistic self-defense” and could be compared with the linguistic resistance that existed in the Soviet Union: the totalitarian language that dominated the public sphere was opposed by the anti-totalitarian language used in the sphere of personal communication; and one of the main instruments of the anti-totalitarian linguistic self-defense was irony. It seems that in 2019, the totalitarian language in Russia was yet at such a stage of development that language resistance was relevant; however, it was feasible not only in private space (and the Internet), but also manifested itself in public space from time to time.