POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF THE RUSSIAN PARLIAMENT DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR: STRATEGY OF EUPHIMIZATION

POLITICAL DISCOURSE OF THE RUSSIAN PARLIAMENT DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR: STRATEGY OF EUPHIMIZATION

Author:  E.A. Besedina, T.V. Burkova, A.N. Michurin

Affiliation:  Saint Petersburg State University

Abstract:  The subject matter of this article is the strategy of euphemization in the formation of a new polit-ical discourse of the Russian Empire during the First World War, more precisely, from August 1914 to the events of February 1917. The aim of the work is to study the unstable political discourse of the State Duma and the State Council, their activities in the specified chronological framework. To analyze the use of euphemisms in the political discourse of the Russian Empire during the First World War, the authors engaged a wide range of sources, including parliamentary speeches of deputies, press materials, memoirs, and private correspondence. The main research method was comparative analysis. The article is written from the standpoint of an interdisciplinary approach that takes into account both the pe-culiarities of historical knowledge and the main provisions of the theory of political linguistics.
The study identified five main features of the political euphemisms in parliamentary speeches: political euphemism describes an object or phenomenon with a negative assessment or negative valence; a euphemistic substitution has a semantic reduction, that is, in contrast to the direct nomination, it reduces the share of information; political euphemisms are characterized by more positive associations aimed at improving the denotation; the formal nature of the improvement of the denotation; dys-phemisms are used much more widely and more actively in the speeches of politicians as the crisis in-tensified from 1914 to 1917.
The authors have drawn conclusions about the role of euphemisms in the speeches of Russian parliamentarians during the First World War as an indicator of escalated political struggle. The inten-sification of the use of dysphemisms in the political speeches of deputies and the transition to confronta-tional agonality, which was distinguished by sufficient radicalism, is explained by the political crisis that is growing in the country in the second half of 1915–1916.
The results of the study can be used in studies on political linguistics, the political history of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, and the history of political discourse.

Keywords:  political language, Russian Empire, State Duma, State Council,
political discourse, political euphemism, political linguistics.

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For citation:  Besedina, E. A., Burkova, T. V., & Michurin, A. N. (2019). Political discourse of the Russian parliament during the First World War: strategy of euphimization // Voprosy Kognitivnoy Lingvistiki, 2, 75-84. (In Russ.).

Pages:  75-84