LINGUAL MARKERS OF PRECEDENT STRATEGY IN EVERYDAY ENGLISH POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of lingual markers of the precedent strategy with imperative intention in everyday English political discourse. This kind of discourse is represented by the speech of nonprofessional politicians, in which common people shape their conceptions about politics, activities of the political institutions and their leaders. In order to modify the activities of politicians in the interests of society, the citizens appeal to precedent phenomena. By doing this the voters encourage the politicians either to follow positive precedence or to avoid negative one. Analysis of the empirical material has revealed that the lingual markers used for the implementation of the precedent strategy belong to the lexical and syntactic levels. The former level is represented by productive use of nouns with the semantics of model behavior “example, style, pattern, mode, way, path, repeat”, adjectives with the semantics of similarity “same, such, similar, equivalent” and conjunctions with the same semantics “like, as”. Frequently the adequate precedent historical situations are introduced into the sentence by the word-combinations “for example, for instance”. The electorate actively use in their speech verbal combinations with the semantics of instructiveness “to take / draw / teach / learn a lesson from, to learn from, to follow the plan / route”. Such verbs as “observe, look at” help to draw the addressee’s attention to the necessary precedence. The demonstrative pronoun “that” serves to establish contact between the realities of today and the existing historical precedents. The syntactic level of the implementation of precedent strategy is characterized by active use of complex sentences with attributive clause, object clauses and circumstantial clause of time. The latter syntactic construction is correlated to the category of “us –them”, where the component “them” is given positive evaluation, and the component “us” receives negative evaluation, what ruins the classical concept of this opposition.