The strategy of evaluative argumentation as a means of linguistic modeling of the police image in oppositional Russian and American newspapers

Abstract

The article is devoted to the strategy of evaluative argumentation in the Russian and American mass media discourse aimed at linguistic modeling of the Police image. The strategy of evaluative argumentation is one of the most effective communicative strategies for modeling the image of a social institution, where the addresser through appeal to the addressee’s emotions creates a certain model verbalized in value components and capable of having a speech impact forming the addressee’s opinion and attitude to a certain object or phenomenon. The category of assessment has the greatest speech-influencing potential due to the fact that it can replace logical argumentation in a media text, and evaluations can obtain the character of arguments themselves. The main functions of law enforcement agencies all over the world are to protect citizens’ life, health, rights and freedoms, that is, the highest values. That is why the value model is of the greatest interest in the study of the Police as a social institution. The author analyzes media texts, represented in such oppositional newspapers as “Novaya Gazeta”, “Kommersant”, “The Washington Post” and “The New York Times” for the period from 1 to 30 January 2021. As a result of the analyses of arguments and argumentative acts from oppositional newspapers representing information about the Russian and American law enforcement agencies’ activities, the author concludes that the positive image of the social institution of the Police in Russianlanguage and English-language media texts is actualized in such evaluative components as “morality”, “ethic”, “humanity”, “protection”, “safety”, “professionalism” and “legitimacy”, and the negative image is verbalized in the components “illegitimacy”, “arbitrariness”, “brutality”, “unprofessionalism”, “bias” and “threat”.