Political discourse from the standpoint of the addressee

Abstract

This article is an overview of West-European and Asian linguistic discussion of the issue of the addressee as one of the key components of political discourse. It considers the concept of political discourse addressee as well as the issue of speech influence and discourse manipulation since the latter is the most important characteristic of the type of discourse under consideration. To date, actualization of the addressee in political discourse is not sufficiently studied; hence, there is a respective gap in political discourse studies. This conclusion is made upon reviewing modern trends in political discourse research in West-European and Asian linguistics, critical discourse analysis being the major and the most representative of them, with the contribution of political discourse analysis and critical applied linguistics. The overview shows that the linguistic trends listed above have contributed greatly into the study of discourse, in general, and political discourse, in particular. The article also demonstrates the results of the study of political discourse addressee as groups of voters, conducted in papers on communication theory and PR-practices and argues that such approach appears insufficient as it must be augmented by the study of the addressee in terms of cognitive linguistics. This paper concludes that an addressee of political discourse is not in the focus of modern West-European linguistics and thus requires further in-depth analysis, which can be done by applying the communicative-cognitive approach in its multimodal aspect.