Discrediting Strategy as a Dominant of the Discursive Personality of an American Political Radio Commentator

Abstract

Introduction. The paper reviews the specifics of the implementation of the discrediting strategy as the dominant of the discursive personality of an American political radio commentator. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the interest of modern linguistics in the description of generalized typical discursive personalities. The scientific novelty of the research is due to the fact that the discursive personality of the political radio commentator has not yet become the object of a special study. The study of a discursive personality is reduced to description of the types of communicative tonality to which a person resorts in the process of communication, as well as identification of the main communicative-pragmatic strategies used by them in order to achieve the goals of communication. The discursive personality of a political commentator-radio host is realized in the generated media texts, which are characterized by a specific communicative tonality due to a distant format and a technically mediated form of communication; social evaluation; ideological focus and polydiscourse.Methodology and sources. The study is drawn on the corpus compiled of scripts of 13 complete radio broadcasts of famous American political commentators (Glenn Beck, Michael Alan Weiner and Mark Levin) with a total volume of 115 792 words. The radio broadcasts were devoted to the election campaign (October – November 2016) and postelection polemics (January – March 2017). Based on the quantitative methods and contextual analysis, conclusions were made about the leading discrediting tactics of the genre under study and the main linguistic means of their actualization.Results and discussion. The strategy of discrediting is shown to be supported by a system of communicative tactics, the main of which are: the tactics of compromising the opponent, the tactics of verbal discrimination and the tactics of verbal insinuation. Each of the tactics, in turn, is implemented by a set of its typical communicative passages. Verbal insinuation and verbal discrimination in the studied genre have been established as the ways of linguistic implementation of such discrediting tactics of emotional impact. The role of evaluative vocabulary, slang, low colloquialisms, invectives, stylistic figurative means, occasionalisms and references to precedent phenomena as means of implementing discrediting tactics are considered. It has been proven that speech tactics of discrediting are never implemented in the studied type of discourse in their pure form since tactical schemes interact and overlap each other.Conclusion. The discrediting tactics in the genre under study are found to be a way of implementing speech aggression. Speech aggression as a feature of the discursive personality of an American political radio host is so affective and hostile that it can be argued that the ethics of speech behavior is not among the communicative values of this linguistic and cultural type. The rejection of ethical communication behavior is largely motivated by the need to participate in a tough competition in the context of the growing intensity of the information flow in modern media communication.