ELECTION JARGON: LANGUAGE MECHANISMS OF MEANING MAKING

Abstract

The article is based on the material of the “Election Campaign Dictionary” by T.P. Tarasenko published in 2017. It classifies and interprets election jargon. Election jargon is a lexical corpus, the units of which combine the features of slang (expressiveness), professionalisms (relevance for election campaign) and terms (exact names of special concepts). According to the topics, jargon words may be divided into 4 groups: 1) names of processes (technologies, methods, devices and scenarios); 2) names of results of election campaign; 3) names of candidates; 4) names of political parties and political groups. Classification of election jargon according to its origin shows that there are Russian and borrowed words, and according to their stylistic coloring there are neutral words and evaluative lexical units (humorous, ironic, rude, disrespectful, pejorative), which proves expansion of this group of Russian vocabulary. Interpretation of election jargon from the point of view of language mechanisms that reveal themselves in word production proves that these mechanisms are compression and concretization of the basic meaning of the jargon. Among specific language mechanisms we find compression-expressive, lexico-semantic (change of meaning, narrowing of meaning and synonymy), word-building, syntactic (lexical combinability) and assessment mechanisms of concretization. These mechanisms contribute both to specification of notions connected with election discourse and economy of verbal means, accuracy of jargonisms, their memorability and suitability for oral and written speech of professionals and unprepared addressees.