SOCIOPOLITICAL VOCABULARY AS THE BASIC INSTRUMENT OF COMMUNICATION IN SOCIOPOLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The language of politics is a tool of political and sociopolitical communication on all levels of the functioning of society. This article examines some features of the sociopolitical vocabulary based on the material of the English- and Ossetian-language media. It focuses, in particular, on the names of persons representing various spheres of human activity. The sociopolitical vocabulary is updated and expands as a result of changes in the social, political and economic spheres of human activities. New lexical units come into being to name concepts, realities and phenomena that have become facts of linguistic reality. The sample of the English- and Ossetian-language vocabulary is conditionally divided into three groups such as nouns and nominative phrases, verbs and verb phrases, and other lexical units. In the English segment, one- part and two-part terminological combinations are most frequent; in the Ossetian segment, three-part terminological combinations are more numerous. The study distinguishes the following thematic groups of vocabulary: nomenclature (representatives of the authorities); persons working in the economic sphere; persons in civil relations; persons representing security or law enforcement agencies; persons whose activities are regulated by international agreements. The specific features of the sociopolitical vocabulary are the wide use of internationalisms, the tendency to produce neologisms and the development of new, additional meanings of common vocabulary and terminological units that function within the framework of various discourses. The author characterizes the most productive ways of term formation: semantic derivation (in English), affixation (in both languages), syntactic derivation (in both languages), abbreviation (in English), borrowing (in both languages), and word composition (in Ossetian).