SPECIFIC CHARACTER OF INFLUENCE AND MANIPULATION FUNCTIONS REALISATION IN AN ENGLISH POLITICAL ESSAY
DOI: 10.23951/1609-624X-2018-7-9-14
In recent years the spread of information warfare has encouraged increasing interest to influencing and manipulative capacity of media. In this regard it appears to be relevant to analyse how this capacity is realized in different publicistic texts. The article aims to illuminate the function specific of a political essay. A political essay combines features of publicistic and newspaper styles. Newspaper style determines realization of informative function while publicistic style – influence function. Those functions are realized through objective and subjective modality respectively. The author uses influence function to impose on readers his ideas and positions, which he does openly and directly. Usually these ideas are stated in the title of the essay and the essay itself is devoted to it. The analysis implies that the influence function is most commonly represented by metaphors, emotionally loaded words and epithets. A political essay is also influenced by the political discourse, which is highly manipulative by its nature. So political discourse makes influence function evolve into manipulation one. The author manipulates when he does not want to reveal his position and tries to indistinguishably force it on readers. That is why the author uses manipulation function to communicate ideas, which are not openly stated and usually are not mentioned in the title or subtitle of the essay.
Keywords: political essay, publicistic style, political discourse, manipulation function, influences function, subjective and objective modality
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Issue: 7, 2018
Series of issue: Issue 7
Rubric: TOPICAL ISSUES OF COGNITIVE-DISCURSIVE LINGUISTICS AND TEXT LINGUISTICS
Pages: 9 — 14
Downloads: 1405