PORTRAITS OF POLITICIANS: TYPOLOGY AND VERBAL ORGANIZATION

Abstract

The article deals with the genre corpus of modern political portraits which are studied from the point of view of their typologization and verbal organization. The corpus of political portraits can be differentiated on various principles. First, these are political portraits proper showing the figure and activity of the politician from a certain perspective, in a more or less complete way, and verbal portraits reflecting the specificity of verbal communication. Second, these are portraits-memoires and journalistic portraits (a narration about a politician, an interview with them). Third, these are portraits of federal and regional politicians. Fourth, these are detailed political portraits and mini-portraits (slogans-characteristics). Finally, it is possible to single out political portraits within the frames of a single semiotic row (verbal) and creolized portraits created with the help of two semiotic rows - verbal and visual. Political portraits proper are based primarily on the category of evaluation and polarization of a “good politician” and a “bad politician”. Analysis of the verbal portraits of politicians is often conducted from the position of their idiostylistic peculiarities which are, to a large extent, determined by the chosen image construct. Idiostyle is also formed by the memes of politicians and language taboos imposed by a number of laws and requirements of political correctness. Both analysis and preparation for publication of books (memoires) of a politician can be approached via form or content. In their turn, journalistic portraits translated through various media outlets need typologization and systematization in the first place. It is possible to single out more than 20 kinds of political portraits on the material of mass newspapers alone, each of which has an original genre, verbal and pragmatic organization. V. V. Putin takes the lead among all politicians of the federal level whose portraits are actively created by mass media. Nowadays, we see a growing interest in the study of the portraits of regional politicians and in the scientific detection of the practical schemes of their image construction. As far as creolized portraits are concerned, they are more often than not built around a precedent visualized image of a famous politician of the past or the present. The visual and verbal semiotic rows may intersect each other, complete each other, and their creative combinability allows the authors to make up an original memorable image of a statesman. In general, the author of the article highlights the following tendencies of development of the genre of political portrait: a) increase in the number of aspects within the frames of which the politician’s personality is described, intimization of information; b) increase in the number of genre variants; c) increase in the percentage of creolized portraits; d) use of the comic forms in the portraits - humor, irony, sarcasm, parody - which is especially typical of popular mass media.