Language and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia: A Corpus Assisted Approach

203 Pages·2014·1.179 MB·

by  Nelya Koteyko (auth.)

Language and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia
Also by Nelya Koteyko
HEALTH COMMUNICATION: Language in Action (co-author)
Language and Politics
in Post-Soviet Russia
A Corpus-Assisted Approach
Nelya Koteyko
University of Leicester, UK
© Nelya Koteyko 2014
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Contents
List of Tables vi
List of Figures vii
Preface viii
Acknowledgements xi
1 Introduction 1
2 Perspectives on Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis 13
3 Sociolinguistic Patterns and Discursive Stages
in Post-Soviet Russia 31
4 Compilation of Specialised Corpora 48
5 Analysis of Quantitative Trends 65
6 Diachronic Study of Paraphrases 93
7 Metaphor Use in Political Speeches 130
8 Concluding Thoughts 148
Appendix 1: Collocational Profiles of the Loanwords 157
Appendix 2: Colligational Patterning of the Loanwords in the CPOP 160
Notes 163
References 167
Index 183
v
List of Tables
2.1 The analytical framework 28
4.1 Internet resources used for the compilation of the
pilot corpus 57
5.1 Negative use of business in the CPOP 76
5.2 Semi-technical use of business in the RPC 78
5.3 Negative use of businessman in the CPOP 79
5.4 Semi-technical use of businessman in the RPC 80
5.5 Negative use of privatisation in the CPOP 80
5.6 Negative use of privatisational in the CPOP 81
5.7 Semi-technical use of privatisation in the RPC 81
5.8 Negative use of manager in the CPOP 83
5.9 Negative use of management in the CPOP 83
5.10 Semi-technical use of manager in the RPC 84
5.11 Negative use of default in the CPOP 85
5.12 Semi-technical use of default in the RPC 85
5.13 Negative use of voucher in the CPOP 87
5.14 Negative use of the adjective voucher in the CPOP 87
7.1 Metaphor keywords 134
vi
List of Figures
5.1 Concordances of крупный бизнес and большой бизнес
(large-scale business) 77
5.2 Concordances of business in the RPC 78
5.3 Concordances of businessman in the CPOP 79
5.4 Concordances of businessman in the RPC 79
5.5 Concordances of privatisation in the CPOP 80
5.6 Concordances of privatisation in the RPC 82
5.7 Concordances of management in the CPOP 83
5.8 Concordances of manager in the RPC 84
5.9 Concordances of default in the CPOP 85
5.10 Concordances of default in the RPC 86
5.11 Concordances of voucher in the CPOP 87
5.12 Concordances of the adjective voucher in the CPOP 88
vii
Preface
Although applicable to all spheres of life in Russia, the following quote
from Lilia Shevtsova’s book particularly aptly characterises the linguistic
scene during the post-Soviet years: ‘Post-communist Russia is a country
of paradoxes. On the one hand, it is a model of endless movement.
On the other, there is evidence all around of inertia and continuity’
(Shevtsova, 1999: 1).
On the one hand, the changes in social, political and economic
activity after perestroika were accompanied by profound linguistic
transformations. Heralding a departure from the totalitarian past and its
‘wooden’ officialese, word play, irony, puns and archaisms together with
loanwords and slang became increasingly abundant and even celebrated
in Russian public discourse. Previous faithful representation of canonic
Communist texts was replaced by a creative play on citations sourced
from a variety of genres. This extraordinary sociolinguistic situation has
been described in terms of carnivalisation, drawing on Bakhtin’s work
that examined how subversive, non-standard language subjects official
discourse to ridicule (Kostomarov and Burvikova, 2001). On the other
hand, however, as early as the mid-1990s it became apparent that this
spirit of linguistic spontaneity did not mean a clean break from the past,
as the widely denounced Soviet themes and lexis re-emerged in public
discourse during this time. The rapid ‘de-sovietisation’ of the Russian
language (Dunn, 1999) has started to show signs of inertia.
This book is an exploration of these linguistic and discursive under-
pinnings of Russia’s transition from the turbulent Yeltsin years to the
new-found stability under Putin’s presidency. It adopts a linguistic per-
spective to take a closer look at the media and political discourses after
the carnival of the early 1990s, when the lack of ideological homogene-
ity became particularly apparent and Soviet narratives were given a new
lease of life. Subscribing to the view that language both helps shape
and is shaped by society and culture, the objectives of this research are
twofold: to offer a historically contextualised analysis of political lan-
guage use in Russia in the decade after the second presidential elections,
and to examine and document changes in discursive trends. Given that
political discourse is strategically in constant interaction with informal
conversation (Chilton and Schäffner, 2002), particular attention is paid
to the rhetorical role of the linguistic creativity that flooded post-Soviet
viii
Preface ix
media and political texts. In this way, creative linguistic features are
taken to be inextricably linked to evaluation and expression of political
stance.
The use of language is one of the key research areas in political stud-
ies, and a range of established linguistic methodologies can be drawn
upon to analyse political texts. The objective to analyse multiple and
competing discourses, and chart discursive trends, necessitates a com-
bination of qualitative and quantitative approaches. For this reason,
the framework of discourse analysis, which sees meaning as contingent
on context, other texts, and interpretation will be combined with cor-
pus linguistic techniques that provide the ‘bigger’ picture of linguistic
patterns across large electronic archives. In this way, examination of
how Russian political events and processes are structured and rendered
linguistically is supported and enriched in this book through employ-
ment of frequency comparisons and visualisations in the form of
concordances. The resulting enquiry will examine both the linguistic
structures ‘used to get politically relevant messages across’ and their
political function by taking into account the broader societal and
historical contexts in which such discourses are embedded (Schäffner,
1997: 1). By providing corpus-based, systematic and detailed analyses
of meaning in Russian newspaper texts and political speeches the book
also aims to illuminate the analytical benefits of using corpora in politi-
cal discourse analysis.
Although variously defined, the notion of discourse provides a good
vantage point for exploring the extent to which everyday linguistic
choices are constrained by existing norms while at the same time
acknowledging individual creativity within these cultural and societal
constraints (Hall, 2005). From this perspective, the emerging tradition
of corpus-assisted discourse analysis offers a useful framework from
which we can observe, reflect on, and critique these processes, described
by Bakhtin in terms of competing centrifugal and centripetal forces in
language use. Both recent corpus linguistic research on creativity in
everyday conversations (Carter, 2004) and earlier work of Sinclair (1991)
on the fundamentally ‘prefabricated’ nature of language have opened
up important dimensions for exploring these tendencies and tracing
the evaluative impact of creative manipulation of linguistic resources.
In this book, the results emerging from the multiple means to query
specialised corpora are expected to reveal the fluid and changing ideo-
logical constraints upon the discourses under study.
The degree to which language and the media were recruited to con-
struct political identities, and particularly oppositional projects, varied