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LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL MEANS OF MANIPULATION IN JAPANESE ELECTION DISCOURSE (FROM PUBLIC SPEECHES OF JAPANESE POLITICIANS)

T. Permyakova, N. Saburova, E. Rufova

Abstract

Role played by political communication is hard to overstate today. Issues of power and authority are discussed openly within any social order built on the principles of transparency and democracy. Hence, solutions to a number of political problems largely depend on the adequacy of their linguistic interpretation. As a genre of political discourse, election discourse represents a type of communication marked by a high level of manipulation due to a number of reasons. That is why is seems important to single out the mechanisms of political communication in order to define key characteristics of language as an impact. One should agree that there exist some stark differences between cultural and communicative practices in Japan and Russia. On the one hand, the importance of analyzing election discourse in Japan is apparent due to the need to find better understanding of Japanese audience dynamics. On the other hand there is a need to better understand the pragmatic charge of Japanese political speech. The analysis of Japanese election discourse would add more clarity to understanding Japanese political communication, thus aiding in advancement of Russia – Japan dialogue. The importance of studying Japanese election discourse lies in the fact that it fully reveals the pragmatic potential of Japanese language. Certain forms of election discourse routinely practiced in Japan make it intensely urgent for politicians to carefully plan both structure and content of their speech, as well as the way of capturing and manipulating the audience. The article focuses on singling out some lexical and grammatical characteristics of language manipulation in Japanese election discourse. The materials for the analysis are several public speeches made by Japanese politicians during a number of political campaigns. In course of analyzing the selected speeches a number of most frequently used lexical and grammatical means of manipulation were singled out. Since the main criteria for selecting the speeches was YouTube frequency filter, it is possible to make certain conclusions concerning the overall efficiency of these techniques.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/SGEMSOCIAL2017/HB31/S10.017

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