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SPEECH PORTRAIT OF A RUSSIAN OPPOSITION CITY MAYOR

A. Tsygankova, M. Nikiforova, A. Chudinov, Z. Dudareva

Abstract

Speech portraying of political figures is a popular research area of modern Russian linguistics (??????? 2007, ????????? 2012, ???????? 2016, ??????? 2012, ?????? 2014, ????? 2016, ???????? 2009, etc). Normally, the scholar’s attention is focused on the discourse of national leaders – kings, presidents, prime-ministers, etc. Meanwhile, the political figures of a lower status (for instance, governors or city mayors) may also be of great scientific interest from the perspective of their communicative behaviour and individual speech style. The present paper deals with the individual discourse of Eu. Roizman, the Mayor of Ekaterinburg. Ekaterinburg is often referred to as the third capital of Russia, while the city mayor does not conceal his critical attitude towards the federal and regional officials and is often called an opposition politician. The objective of the research is to identify Eu. Roizman’s speech portrait features that prove to be appealing for the electorate. By ‘a speech portrait’ here we understand a combination of language and speech-behavioral characteristics of an individual in the framework of a certain sphere of communication. Our model of a speech political portrait is a sequential analysis of three functional aspects of a politician’s verbal activity, which correspond to the levels of linguistic personality in the Karaulov model (????????, 1987), that is 1) linguo-cognitive, dealing with key concepts and metaphors of the politician’s discourse), 2) pragmatic, analyzing communicative roles, patterns, strategies and tactics), and 3) stylistic, focusing on the politician’s individual speech style. The conducted analysis shows that the basis of Eu. Roizman’s speech portrait is the image of ‘people’s politician’, which is formed through 1) evaluative connotations within the ‘friend of foe’ dichotomy; 2) socio-cultural self-identification with the people of Ekaterinburg; 3) spoken language, which becomes a means of solidarity with the electorate.

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