POLITICAL DISCOURSE: MAIN TRENDS AND APPROACHES

Abstract

The article presents an overview of the main trends and approaches to the study of political discourse. The combination of linguistic and ideological structural approaches to the discourse analysis of specific texts leads to an understanding of discourse as a point of intersection of language and ideology, and discursive analysis as an analysis of ideological aspects of language use and the implementation of a certain ideology in language. Institutional discourse is a discourse determined by the types of social institutions formed in a certain society, characterized by a number of linguistically relevant features determined by such factors as the purpose of communication, the representative communicative function of its participants, and fixed typical circumstances of communication. One of the types of institutional discourse is political discourse, which is a reflection of the socio-political life of the country, contains elements of its culture, and also reflects the features of the national character, general and national-specific cultural values, and aims to gain and maintain political power. The main functions of political discourse are informative, instrumental, prognostic, normative, legitimating, persuasive and political propaganda. In political linguistics, genres related to the functioning of the political system are distinguished (for example, parliamentary debates, political manifestos and programs, reports of party leaders at conferences, political documents), genres related to mass media (for example, political news, political interviews, talk shows, political advertising in the press) and genres related to the public sphere (for example, meetings with citizens, political forums). Emphasizing the special role of the media in the implementation of political discourse, with the help of which it becomes addressed to a large audience, public, there is a tendency to merge the discourse of the mass media and political discourse.