EVASION STRATEGY IN NEWS DISCOURSE
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2019-7-32-39
Introduction. The study focuses on news discourse and on its persuasive dimension in particular. News discourse has a number of standard strategies to promote the persuasive process for assertions. If propositions are to be accepted as true or plausible, there must be special means to enhance their appearance of truth and plausibility. Material and methods. The theoretical perspective of the paper is the critical epistemic discourse analysis proposed by T. A. van Dijk. The paper considers mental representation of the event nominated in British and American mass media as RUSSIAN SPY POISONING. Results and discussion. The study highlights the evasion strategy as a form of discourse-based mental influence in news discourse. From a pragmatic approach evasion is viewed as violation of one of the conversational maxims formulated by P. Grice which requires contributions to conversations to be truthful. The author claims that the aim of the evasion strategy in representing news is to discursively emphasize those properties of mental models that are consistent with the interests of the dominant social groups and discursively deemphasize those properties that are inconsistent with their interests. Consequently, evasion strategy results in partial, incomplete or biased understanding of the news story in the interests of a dominant social group. Evasion presupposes formulation of meanings in such a way that they are not merely understood but also accepted as the truth or at least as a possible truth. The article discusses strategic devices of evasion like hedging, referential vagueness, focus shift, selective use of evidential and epistemic markers, half truth. Conclusion. The author comes to the conclusion that evasion strategy contributes to the formation or reactivation of preferred mental models and may thus be used in manipulative discourse use.
Keywords: evasion strategy, news discourse, vagueness, hedging, foregrounding, focus shift, manipulation
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Issue: 7, 2019
Series of issue: Issue 7
Rubric: TOPICAL ISSUES OF DISCOURSIVE LINGUISTICS
Pages: 32 — 39
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