Discursive realization of threat in pre-election communication

Abstract

This article focuses on the question of pragmatic effectiveness of threat statements in political communication, in particular, the relevance of using threats in pre-election programs and intimidating voters with the goal of forcing them to vote for a certain politician. The aim of this article is to consider pre-election threat statements as verbal regulative actions and to propose a typology of such constructive menacives taking into account the targeted orientation of their consequent component. This study is based on a corpus of threat statements realized in the presidential candidates’ pre-election programs in Russia in 2018. The total number of menacives is 1. The study investigated the data from the perspective of the theory of speech activity, speech act theory and psychosemantics. The theoretical framework of the study is an action-related approach to the analysis of speech (dialogic) acts developed in Tver semantic and pragmatic research school (Romanov 1988; 2002; 2020). The study specified 18 targeted types of menacives that have a certain pragmatic and emotional effect on voters and are characterized by different frequencies in pre-election programs. This result demonstrates that the author of the pre-election program does not know mass voter’s preferences, their emotional state and feelings well; therefore, the politician directs their menacing influence on a wide range of potential voters. The authors conclude that politicians deliberately prefer to use threat statements with negative effect on an unfocused audience trying to win the attention and votes. The analysis shows that four types of threat statements with different targeting of consequent component proved to be a pragmatically effective tool in the Russian pre-election campaign in 2018. The results of this study can be used to predict the pragmatic effect of politicians’ threat statements on voters.