Pragmatic focusing techniques of negative Russia image in American media discourse

Abstract

The article presents a brief study of the means focusing the negative image of Russia in the modern American media discourse, namely, newspaper publications in 2012–2017. We consider speech strategies, tactics of influencing public consciousness, as well as language tools that actualize these ways of presenting information. The purpose of the article is to analyze the most representative ways of pragmatic focusing on the global threat posed by the Russian state, according to the authors of the publications reviewed. To achieve it, we identify the most popular tactics of speech influence and the ways of their actualization at the lexical, syntactic and compositional levels. We have established that the most recurrent ways of implementing the author’s intention, aimed at creating a hostile image of Russia, are as follows: the imposition of certain propositions, demonization of the country’s image, absence of the referent, concealment of causal connections, creation of semantic redundancy and synergy effect, and use of invective labels. Actualization of these tactics is carried out through the author’s appeal to the following verbal means: desemanticized affectives, negatively colored vocabulary, idioms, phrasal verbs, metaphorization, repetition at the lexical level; complex syntactic constructions, impersonal constructions, passive voice, inversion and antithesis at the syntactic level and, finally, reduction of the stylistic register of the text to a conversational level in order to ensure the understanding of the transmitted meanings in the context of the author’s intention.