Discursive construction of “others” in the semiotic space of political communication

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the presentation of linguo-semiotic and linguo-pragmatic means of discursive construction of “otherness” in modern British political communication. “Others” in political communication are viewed in two perspectives: intra-cultural (“others” are in the same country as the speaker / writer) and inter-cultural (“others” are the representatives of the countries different from the addressant’s). The idea of discursive construction of reality reflects the modern tendencies in today linguistics and is defined in the paper as an instrumental-analytical method that allows to categorize a fragment of reality in discursive terms. The research is conducted in the context of a pragmatic approach to the study of political communication involving the methods of critical and multimodal dis-course analysis. The authors present linguo-communicative model of constructing “otherness” with the four basic strategies (identification of “otherness”, justification and retention of the status of the “others”, transformation and destructive strategies) and twenty-one discursive-semiotic techniques which display “otherness” through the range of linguistic, discursive and multimodal means. The presented model of the discursive construction of “otherness” in British political communication can provide a basis for a comparative analysis of political systems in different countries which is topical in the contemporary cross-cultural interaction.