Suggestion Potential of Precedent Units in Ukrainian Media-Discourse of the Early 21-st Century.

Abstract

The dissertation focuses on the research of precedent units’ manipulative potential, their structural, typological and functional features in the Ukrainian media discourse of the XXI century. We define media discourse as one of the kinds of institutional discourses aimed at informing and influence on the mass recipient. The text and discursive categories of media discourse are discursive interference, multimediality, hypertextuality, intertextuality etc.; they are motivated by general postmodern social and cultural context of their existence.

Intertextuality as a basic category of media discourse in the context of postmodern socio-cultural paradigm is interpreted in a narrow sense – as a formal explicit relationship of texts realized through fragments of other texts in the receiving text in the form of quotations, references, allusions, paraphrases etc. The system of intertextual units contains the means of direct and indirect appeal to the original source (proto-text), that include quotations and mentions, as well as allusions and precedent units respectively.

Precedent units are means of verbal actualization of precedent phenomena in the text such as significant events, personalities of social or cultural life of linguocultural community. The main types of precedent phenomena are precedent texts, situations and personalities that can be verbalized in the text through precedent units – names and expressions.

To clarify the status of precedent units among other intertextual ones they were separated from metaphors and aphorisms on the basis of the need to relate the former with the source of their occurring – proto-text – to adequately interpret their meaning. The precedent units differ from phraseology itself by the presence of their clearly established source of origin – precedent phenomenon. Considering the set of common features (reference to prototype phenomenon, renown of units, reproducibility, integrity, semantic capacity) of precedent units and winged words the latter are attributed to the precedent expressions.

The most productive source areas of precedence in the Ukrainian media discourse of the early XXI century are social sphere (policy, significant social and historical events, personalities and associations, political slogans, etc.), sphere of science and art (scientific branches, literature, folklore, television, cinema etc.), sphere of religion (all existing faiths and beliefs). On a national basis of the source of origin the precedent phenomena and relevant precedent units as their exponents can be classified into Ukrainian units, borrowed ones and Soviet units.

Functions of precedent units in media discourse depend on the position of a unit in the text, its form, however their basic functions are evaluative, attractive, modeling, consolidative, euphemistic, pragmatic, aesthetic.

Precedence is considered from the perspective of its manipulative potential as an effective means of author’s evaluative intentions implementation, as precedent unit always appeals to the axiologically and emotionally relevant precedent phenomenon. Implementation of appraisal by means of precedence occurs implicitly and leads to the imposition of subjective author's opinion on the message recipient. Unconsciousness and emotional load of such influence on the recipient increases its effectiveness, as well as determines the type of manipulation as a suggestion.

The basic tactics of suggestive influence appear to be irony, criticism, stereotyping, appeal to an authoritative source or social norms, masking of the author's thoughts under common knowledge, opposition of archetypes of “own” and “other’s” and so on.

The implementation of the suggestive strategy occurs by means of precedence at all language levels. One of the most effective methods of its implementation is transformation of precedent units while preserving their awareness. The main technics of precedent units’ structure transformation at the morphological, lexical and syntactic levels are addition, replacement of element and truncation of structure. At the phonetic level transformations take place mainly to explicit specific pronunciation actualizing primarily precedent personalities. At the communicative-pragmatic level transformations relate to the change of intonation pattern of expression.

The main strategy of protection against suggestion (counter-suggestion strategy) is awareness of the recipient on the ongoing influence of media discourse. This implies the basic tactics of counter-suggestion including a rational distrust to the sources of information and use of multiple sources of data to identify the most objective state of affairs, maintaining emotional balance.