Language Markers of Leadership in Political Discourse

Abstract

Leadership as an indispensable element of social relations is an object of research within different schools of thought; however, its common understanding has not been developed yet. Different authors share the opinion that leadership includes authority, ability to lead, take decisions, influence people, organize and structure group interaction, unite people to achieve a goal. In linguistics it is studied in sociolinguistics, political and anthropological linguistics. In the research the authors aim at detecting special language markers of leadership in the speech of a political leader which are verbalized by language means of different language layers, while their choice depends on sociocultural codes shared by the leader, typical of certain linguoculture, age, social, professional group, and stipulated by individual features of the leader’s personality. Considering the existing approaches to linguistic markers analysis, the authors point out at the relevance of sociolinguistic and athropolinguistic approaches, as these markers lie in the area of intersection of social dialect and leader’s idiolect. On the material of the interview of V.V. Putin to NBC journalist the authors attempt to detect, describe and classify markers of leadership in the political leader’ discourse. To define the lexical means of verbalization of leadership the authors employ the theoretical insights of conceptual fields theory. Pragmarhetoric markers are studied through speech acts theory. The research proved the authors’ hypothesis that a leader’s speech contains a multi-level complex of language markers of leadership, i.e. lexical and pragmarhetoric units which express the phenomenon of leadership in the discourse of a political leader.