Public Speeches Of Royal Family Members: Political Or Journalistic Discourse?

Abstract

The authors try to investigate the problem to which kind of the status-oriented discourse – the political or the journalist ones – the peculiar model of the genre of public speeches, namely, the public speeches of the members of the British Royal family, belong, as they show the traces of the both types of discourse mentioned. The main methods to achieve the aim of the study were the critical discourse analysis and the set of traditional methods of investigating the functional properties of different units of speech and speech structures. The result of the investigation shows that the object of the study, i.e. the texts and constituting them speech units and structures reveal a certain peculiarity in the manifestation of this particular genre sub-model as compared with the corresponding genres within the political and journalist types of discourse. In particular, the choice of words and word-combinations, the peculiar character of using expressive means and stylistic devices, a certain thematic separateness of such speeches show that, though adjacent to these types of discourse, the genre sub-model of the British Royal Family members’ public speeches stands somewhat aside the corresponding genre of the named types of the institutional discourse, though structurally it does belong to the general genre. The problem needs to be investigated further.