XXXIII. MEĐUNARODNI ZNANSTVENI SKUP HRVATSKOG DRUŠTVA ZA PRIMIJENJENU LINGVISTIKU
ZNAČENJE U JEZIKU – OD INDIVIDUALNOGA DO KOLEKTIVNOGA
16. DO 18. SVIBNJA 2019.
RIJEKA (HRVATSKA)

Sukonstruiranje značenja u medijsko-političkom diskursu

Co-Construing Meaning in Political Discourse in the Media

The political communication in the media as “battle for the definition of the situation” (Windisch 1987) is an exceptionally interesting ground for the testing of the way in which the meaning is co-construed in discourse through the interaction of different stakeholders – politicians, citizens and the media, whereby the social networks play a special role as a meeting place of these different stakeholders, gathering around the same political ideas and programmes and articulating individual and collective interests and goals.

Regardless if we come from de Saussure’s understanding of the discourse as language in action and interactive meaning proposal or from the contemporary discourse concept that according to the generally accepted widest definition encompasses the super syntax dimension of language expressions and social and historic conditions of their production, dealing with the discourse aspects of the collective in the meaning implies the inclusion of the basic principles of discourse functioning, primarily the principles of (inter)activity, interdiscursivity and finality in the analysis of the meaning of individual expressions.

The theoretical framework of this research is the modular discourse analysis (Roulet et al. 2001) as the integrating, general approach to the complexity of discourse organisation, which we combine, pursuant to the principle of the transportability of cognition (Nølke 1994) in order to achieve a higher precision of analysis, with the achievements ensuing from other analytical models focused on the specific aspects of discourse functioning (Bange 1992, Adam 1999) or a certain type of discourse or discourse genre (Charaudeau 1997, 2008, 2014, Moirand 2007).

We base our observations on the analysis of an authentic text corpus published on web portals and social networks on the occasion of the general election in Bosnia and Herzegovina in October 2018 during the pre-election campaign and the post-election period of the government constitution.

Following Charaudeau, who advocates an ideologically neutral approach to the political discourse in the media, focused on the linguistic analysis of mechanisms that are mutual to all the stakeholders on the political chess-board, regardless of their ideological differences, the process of co-construing of the meaning in the analysed expressions is interpreted in this paper from the viewpoint (1) of their finality (goal) (e.g. legitimising act / delegitimising act, acceptance act / rejection act, unmasking act / justification act, adulation act / provocation-challenge act etc.), (2) production instances (local politicians, citizens, media, international community) and (3) instances of reception (other politicians, citizens, media, international community). In the analysed corpus, this latest stakeholder appears as an important co-constructor of the meaning, in particular in the segment of limitation of the freedom of speech when it is abused as hate speech, i.e. in the segment of qualifying a certain expression as hate speech and delegitimising politicians.

Key words: finality, legitimisation, delegitimisation