Филологические науки /4. Синтаксис: структура, семантика, функция

Mironina А. Y., Shishkina I. S.

Vyatka State Humanities University

Inserted constructions in political texts

Language of politics is considered to be a sphere of enhanced speech responsibility. It is an official language of public authorities, and its means of influence differ from the means of language used in fiction, publicistic writing and everyday speech.

The main function of discourse is to have an impact on an interlocutor. Therefore, the main feature of discourse, including political discourse, is a communication and pragmatic attitude that implies a targeted selection of means of language by a person to have a certain effect on a listener.

Inserted constructions are considered to be one of the means of language to have a certain impact on the audience in political discourse. In writing inserted constructions are understood as certain syntactic units which are graphically delimited, differ from other means of sentence expansion by special structural, positional, communicative and pragmatic characteristics. As a rule, inserted constructions are punctuationally marked with the help of brackets or double dash, it is a distinctive feature of such constructions.

Use of inserted constructions depends on the author’s intentions. They are as follows:

Firstly, an inserted construction adds information to an utterance and therefore it contributes to the realization of the cue function of the text. In such a case, the information, chosen by the author and introduced into the utterance by means of the inserted construction, affects the reader, conveys the author’s view on facts and actions either expressly or by implication.

Secondly, it is a mistake to think that a passage of the text used parenthetically is the author’s accidental associations or thoughts that arise in the act of speech. The passage used parenthetically always conveys the author’s sophisticated intention, his wish to highlight the chosen segment of speech and foreground it. Punctuation marks serve to emphasize subtle shades of meaning, to stress the important details, to show their significance and expressiveness. Parenthesis as a way of introducing information chosen by the author attracts the reader’s attention; hence, the information introduced by means of the inserted construction has a greater impact on the audience.

As we study the use of inserted constructions in political discourse, it is necessary to point out that they contribute to the political discourse coherence. In holistic writing inserted constructions express the author’s opinion, mark the peculiarities of thinking, introduce some details, add or remove equivocation of the message.

To illustrate the distinguishing features of inserted constructions in political discourse, let us consider the following examples:

1. On Wednesday, however, most of the issues were touched on only with a broad brush, and some – such as an amnesty – not at all (The Washington Post, 14.05.2014).

The given example illustrates the clarifying nature of the inserted construction located in the interposition. The author points out the importance of the matter, in particular, granting amnesty (separatists must surrender in exchange for amnesty), which was not even discussed. The author’s negative attitude to the current political situation in the country is also shown in the context.

2. The only way to sell that to Americans – much less the Europeans – would be to repeat the Dean Acheson formula at the beginning of the Cold War of painting the threat “clearer than truth” (The Washington Post, 13.05.2014).

The inserted construction in the given sentence serves to specify information on the deterrence policy accepted by the countries during the Cold War. There is also some evaluation in the parenthesis (much less), the author stresses that fact that the Americans much less the Europeans can hardly adopt such a policy.

3. The Western coverage of Ukraine has given new meaning to the phrase double standards; it has taken the ‘journalism of attachment’ – the fashion among Western observers for childishly painting foreign conflicts as simplistic clashes between the pure and the wicked – to a new low (The Spiked, 13.05.2014).

Parenthesis is located in the middle of the sentence in this example. The author’s intention is to explain the meaning of the word combination ‘journalism of attachment.’ The inserted construction is emotionally coloured, the emotional connotation is represented by the vocabulary: childishly painting. The context lets the reader understand that western mass media cover any foreign news as a collision between the innocent and villains using “double standards”.

4. The conventional wisdom is that ordinary citizens of these states – feudally ruled, politically pillaged – will become obsessed about corruption (The American Interest, 13.05.2014).

In this case the inserted construction located in interposition and expressed by the homogeneous participles (ruled, pillaged) foregrounds and clarifies the information, indicates a complicated nature of the issue under consideration. The author stresses that average citizens who are subject to feudal methods of ruling and political plundering will be prone to corruption.

Thus, inserted constructions, being semantically independent to a certain extent, are considered to be one of the ways to contribute thoroughness to a message. Parenthesis plays an important role in text building, performing emotional, clarifying and evaluative functions. Inserted constructions are often used as a specific way to suggest an idea, to present the author’s comments on the text. These constructions produce diversity and introduce metalinguistic means into the discourse.

References:

1. Polyakova Ya., G. Structure and peculiarities of parenthesis functioning in the language of newspapers: diss… cand. Sc. Magnitogorsk, 2001. – 208 p.

2. Budaev E.V., Chudinov A.P. Foreign political linguistics. – M., 2008.

3. Sanochkina N.N. Some aspects of emotional and expressive syntax in the discourse of modern German press (a case study of German newspapers): thesis … Cand. Sc., – M., 2003. – 14 p.