Редкая и малоупотребительная лексика как прагматический инструмент современного французского политического дискурса

Abstract

The article deals with the rare and uncommon vocabulary used in contemporary French political discourse. Nowadays discourse studies are becoming increasingly complex and multidimensional. Political discourse is an essential component of everyday political life. The choice of research question is determined by its contribution to cross-cultural communication, as well as by the lack of discursive explorations regarding the rare and uncommon vocabulary. Our hypothesis is that this type of lexis would have some pragmatic motivation and may serve to realize a certain number of communication tasks. Thus, our research aims to describe the collected samples and reveal their pragmatic potential. Discursive analysis coupled with frequency evaluation shapes a methodological framework for our study. The total number of lexical samples is 32 units coming from public speeches, debates and interviews of contemporary French politicians. We have checked the frequency profile of all collected observations on the Google Books French Corpus Ngram Viewer. In order to test the relevance of the corpus and optimize the interpretation of results, we have also introduced a «control group», which contain 31 lexical units expectedly present in political lexicon. Our analysis shows that the rare and uncommon vocabulary serves various pragmatic goals, such as demonstrating the speaker’s performance, capture the audience's attention, achieving a euphemistic effect and some others. Our research gives us ground to affirm that the pragmatic effects of this type of lexical phenomena are due to its ability to break the functional isomorphism of discourse space. The arising disharmony may be caused by temporary disparity (obsolete words), topical mismatch (special vocabulary) or cultural variance (book words with complex semantics, little-known words or constructions, regional and foreign language borrowings). In general, our research leads us to conclude that the rare and uncommon vocabulary possess diverse pragmatic functions, which present an undoubted interest in further research.