Engagement Stance in the Illegitimate Discourse Practice

Abstract

The paper deals with an interpersonal approach to the study of mediated political communication, that is aimed at the description of text impact capacity considered as tool of influence on group characteristic of an engaged object through the acceptance of the involving person's attitudes. The goal of the study was reached through rhetorical analysis, the methodology of critical discourse analysis and sociolinguistic theory of membership categorization. The concept of "engagement stance" is introduced and considered as metadiscourse characteristics of a communicative artefact reflecting the initiative of the subject (an initiator of engagement) whose purpose is to involve the audience to the ideology and practice of a terrorist organization. The study takes into account linguistic-parametric signs, significant for law enforcement practice, which make it possible to externalize the mindset to involve others in committing the crimes of an extremist (terrorist) orientation and to identify its verbal indicators. Rhetorical analysis of the engagement stance proves, that adaptation of the text type depends on the communicative intentions of the corporate author and shows text capacity for genre transformations caused by public circumstances, it is presented in the following characteristics: a) asymmetry as an interactional feature of the corporate subject and the object of an engagement action; b) perception of the corporate subject as an absolute truth holder, whose views acceptance is positioned as the only right decision for the object; c) the regulatory nature of the message aimed at receiving responses controlled by the sender (the corporate subject of an engagement).