Discourse Marker you know in Political Communication (on the Basis of Interviews With d. Trump from 2017 to 2020): Functions, Translation Strategies

Abstract

Traditionally discourse markers were defined as language entities that serve to connect sentences, having no impact on the meaning of the sentence itself due to the fact that they are completely deprived of any denotative meaning. Today the perception of the role and status of discourse markers has changed, and these “empty little fillers” that tend to pollute the language have become the subject of many studies from the standpoint of cognitive science and pragmatics. Despite the fact that discourse markers are devoid of semantic meaning, nevertheless, they received their functional recognition — the functions of location, cohesion and predication, and pragmatic characteristics were assigned to them. The aim of the article is to analyze the discursive and pragmatic features of the discourse marker “you know” in a political discourse. Based on the presumption that political discourse is a land of possible worlds, aiming to create the plurality of worlds in the consciousness of recipients while performing its core function (manipulative), the article gives an overview of macro and micro functions of the discourse marker “you know” focusing on manipulation. The essential characteristics of discourse markers in a political communication elicited in the article are ambivalence and bifunctionality. Some examples of the marker “you know” in a deictic microfunction will be given to prove the hypothesis that discourse markers transform their functions depending on the mode of its use in a natural or political language. The manipulative role of discourse markers in the interpretation mode is described in the light of the theory of relevance, translation strategies of discourse marker from English into Russian are analyzed using the approach of the functional-communicative theory of translation on the basis of D. Trump’s television interview.