Language and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

A Corpus Assisted Approach

N. Koteyko

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137314093
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Russische Geschichte

Language and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia critically examines the uses of language in post-Soviet media and political texts between 1998 and 2007. It will be of interest to academics and researchers in the fields of media studies, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and scholars in Russian Studies.

1

Introduction

This book is concerned with three main areas: corpus linguistics, Russian political discourse and the media. The key focus is the relationship between corpus linguistics and discourse analysis, in particular how such features as connotations and metaphors can be studied with the help of corpora. At the same time, this book is about a certain type of text and talk – that of politics and, specifically, Russian politics in the post-Soviet period, which so far has only rarely been approached from the perspective of critical linguistics. The third and final, and no less important, feature of this book lies in its linguistic and historically oriented analysis of Russian media texts, which represent a window into political and discursive realities of two presidencies. Below I will discuss these three themes in more detail.

1.1 Corpora and discourse

At present, corpus-based studies is one of the major research paradigms in linguistics. A relatively young discipline of corpus linguistics that relies on electronically stored texts to perform automated searches and frequency calculations has become widely popular, as it allows an unprecedented access to vast collections of naturally occurring data. In previous decades, corpus linguistics was mostly employed in the service of lexicography and language teaching. More recently, its methods have been used in a number of other areas of linguistic inquiry such as language description, language variation studies and forensic linguistics. These studies have demonstrated that a corpus linguistic framework offers reliable and replicable techniques that can be successfully applied to explore various facets of language use. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we have by no means exhausted the vast research potential offered by corpora. New applications, fresh perspectives on, and novel methods of, processing linguistic information held by large collections of machine-readable text have to be given much more consideration.

Here I want to explore an area where the application of corpus linguistic methods is particularly promising and challenging at the same time – the study of discourse. Discourses are constructed, at least in part, via language, and although there is hardly agreement on what constitutes discourse and subsequently what role language plays in it, it is still possible to carry out analysis of texts in order to uncover discursive processes. Media discourse, for example, has always attracted interest from critical linguists (Hodge and Kress, 1993; Fowler, 1991), as news journalism brings into focus (and often power) a range of different voices, especially those of leaders, celebrities and other figures of public attention. The pervasive influence of the media in contemporary society has inspired many studies by critical discourse analysts who scrutinise newspaper texts to uncover political and ideological agendas behind them (Fairclough, 1995b; Richardson, 2007; van Dijk, 1991). Such analyses have illuminated various stages in the process of recontextualisation of political phenomena in media coverage, and contributed to the ongoing debate on the role of journalism in the political process (Macgilchrist, 2011), including the growing literature on ‘mediated democracy’.

For at least a decade now, corpus linguists have also shown an interest in the ideological implications of language use. This has translated into studies characterised by a mixed methods design, where the predominantly quantitative methodology of corpus linguistics is used to complement a qualitative inquiry set out within the parameters of discourse analysis. This book aims to contribute to this burgeoning interest in the corpus-based or corpus-assisted analysis of discourse (Partington, 2003, 2010, 2012; Partington et al., 2004; Baker and McEnery, 2005; Baker et al., 2008) by setting out to explore how corpus linguistics can serve as a methodological framework both for quantitative and qualitative analyses of political discourses. In common with the leading proponents of corpus linguistics, most notably Stubbs (1996, 2001), I advocate the use of corpus linguistic methodologies to explore ideological formations. In contrast with many corpus-based studies, however, my analysis does not stop at providing generalisations about uses of particular (usually politically or socially important) words in a given discourse, but goes further to unpack their meanings and uses as ‘keywords’ in the rich sense lent to the term by Raymond Williams (1983). Whereas lexicographic descriptions, nowadays based on corpora, try to eliminate ambivalence and contradictions inherent in political and economic terms, the historical and cultural approach inspired by Williams’ seminal work allows us to examine their possible contested meanings, treating such terms as nodes around which many historical and social realities can be explored. By developing linguistic descriptions which relate to culture and ideology, I want to explore and extend the points of synergy between corpus linguistics and critical discourse studies (CDS).

This approach seems particularly suited for the analysis of two post-Soviet sociolinguistic tendencies conditioned by various trials and tribulations of Russia’s social, political and economic life. First, due to the reforms initiated during perestroika, language use became a key instrument in post-Soviet political discourse. Whereas in the West, ‘linguistic politics’ have gained importance in ideological confrontations since the 1960s, in Russia it is only during and after this transformation period that it became common to treat words and images as a useful material in political battles. To be clear, manipulation of public opinion through language use undoubtedly took place in the Soviet era, but such manipulation was not geared towards gaining political advantage due to absence of opposition. By contrast, the transition to the multi-party system highlighted the role of language in political campaigns, calling for dismantling of the authoritarian mode of discourse and using new linguistic devices to engage the electorate. As a result, as Anderson (1996) observes, the distance separating the register of politics from standard Russian was reduced by Gorbachev, and eventually eliminated by electoral politicians in the post-Soviet era.

Second, as the link between language change and politics is particularly acute during the time of social upheaval, the post-Soviet period represents a great opportunity to explore the processes of discursive change and stability, evident inter alia through the large-scale borrowing of new lexis. In the context of the post-perestroika reforms this process was most visible in the transformation of economy-related ideas and concepts, when the system of the market economy with its principles and implications was being accepted, but also at the same time adapted to certain ideas already existing in post-Soviet society. Familiar notions were being reinterpreted or rephrased and entered circulation in a new wording, accompanied by many foreign words imported to denote the new concepts, such as ‘voucher’ or ‘privatisation’. Subsequently, meanings of these borrowed lexical items were being negotiated by members of the Russian discourse community. This led to their continual redefinition within the highly dynamic political environments of the first post-Soviet decade. As a result, the loanwords acquired various, and often conflicting, connotations. Depending on the context, one and the same loanword could be used to describe a state of affairs either positively or negatively (Krysin, 1998; Ryazanova-Clarke and Wade, 1999). While the language of perestroika and the early post-Soviet period attracted significant attention from linguists and lexicographers, later years of Russian language evolution are comparatively less analysed, particularly by corpus linguists and discourse analysts.

It should therefore be clarified at the start that this book is not only about corpus linguistics being a valuable ‘quantitative ally’ for inherently qualitative studies of texts. Despite the current predominance of quantitative approaches that prioritise statistical recognition of patterns in large collections of electronic data, the pursuit of corpus linguistics does not preclude an intensive study of individual texts and text segments and the links between them. In this book I therefore discuss how principles of corpus compilation and techniques of data management based on currently available corpus linguistic software can allow a detailed and systematic analysis of intertextual links in a particular discourse. Such an approach fits well with the recent trend in discourse studies observed by Swan: ‘On the whole … there does seem to have been a shift towards more localized studies’ and ‘far less reliance on quantifiable and/or general patterns’ (2002: 59).

While the application of corpus linguistic methods to the study of media and political discourses is becoming popular, the number of studies fully engaging with the methodological and theoretical implications is still limited. Although this book also does not aim to cover this vast territory, the intention is to present a critical overview of methodological and theoretical points that emerge from the study of political discourse within the framework of corpus linguistics. A number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavours are discussed in this process, including various strands in discourse analysis, media and cultural studies, as well as sociology and linguistics. In these disciplines, certain theoretical standpoints now prevail: the idea that realities are socially and linguistically constructed; that power relations are constructed and deconstructed through the uses of language, and that language is often the vehicle of social change. The discussion of a broad range of perspectives is necessary to account for this multifaceted nature of language as a social, cultural and historical entity.

A prominent place in the post-structuralist metalanguage and, as we will see further in this book, in some present-day approaches to discourse analysis, is occupied by the term ‘intertextuality’. The concept is currently employed in a range of areas from biblical criticism to the studies of film production and reception, and comes with its own history. At the broadest level, intertextuality refers to the view of text as a container of various references from another text or texts. However, since there are multiple ways in which texts can be seen as linked with each other, there can hardly be a single and encompassing definition of intertextuality. To gain appreciation for the term’s many meanings and applications, one is advised to turn to Allen’s comprehensive study (2000) that considers the various ways that intertextuality has been defined since its inception. Out of the many incarnations of the concept, I will refer to the notion of intertextuality born in the French intellectual Weltanschauung in the late 1960s (Allen, 2000), when an array of established concepts within philosophy, political science and psychoanalytic theory were being transformed by the critique of structuralism. This notion will be further adapted in the course of the corpus-assisted diachronic analysis, and in its most narrow sense will be used to refer to a specific form of inter-reference between texts.

The analysis of intertextual features is here to shed light on the emergence of meaning in discourse. Meanings of words are constantly in flux because we, as members of various discourse communities, (re-)negotiate them as society moves forward in time. As a rule, these changes in meaning are seen either as a language-internal process and therefore analysed with linguistic methods, or as language-external developments often studied with little regard to linguistic considerations within a socio-historical framework. This book argues that the diachronic analysis of meaning in discourse has to accommodate both aspects and treat them as complementary: a specific theory of meaning which draws on lexical semantics as well as a broader view of meaning as a product of social and cultural relationships.

The empirical part of this book is represented by a corpus-assisted analysis of post-Soviet political discourses between 1996 and 2007. The data selected for this study have two advantages over contemporary corpora compiled to explore discourses in Westernised countries. First, the vast majority of corpus-based analyses tend to rely on texts written in English or other languages of the European Union. In contrast, the principled collections of texts in this study consist of Russian newspaper texts and political speeches. Second, as a rule, present-day corpus data come from mainstream discourse as typical text sources are big circulation newspapers. The main focus of such corpus-assisted discourse studies therefore falls on the role of media in enforcing and perpetuating ideologies of the dominant groups (Fairclough, 2001), which necessarily limits the possibilities to explore the use of lexical items in alternative or counter-discourses (Terdiman, 1985). This book sets out to overcome this limitation by studying language use in corpora sourced both from mainstream newspapers and small-circulation periodicals of the opposition.

1.2 Russian politics in the post-Soviet period

It is not within the remit of this book to even begin detailing the social and political transformations that took place in Russia during the period of Boris Yeltsin’s and Vladimir Putin’s presidencies which span over a decade. Such overviews and detailed accounts are available elsewhere, namely in the work of Shevtsova (1999, 2003, 2007a, b), Sakwa, (2008), White et al. (2010), White (2010, 2011) and many others. In this introductory chapter it seems more appropriate to sketch the basic trends in Russian political thought to the extent that they relate to my data. The next section engages with the media industry side of these socio-economic transformations, whereas the ensuing discursive shifts are discussed in Chapter 3.

The period between the breakdown of one regime and emergence of another was of course a highly turbulent time in Russia. The core of the difficulties experienced by the Russian ruling elite at the beginning of the first post-Soviet decade is poignantly described by Shevtsova as the time when ‘Yeltsin and his team were forced to attempt four revolutions at once: create a free market, democratize the state, abolish an empire and create a non-imperial Russia, and seek a new geopolitical role for a former nuclear superpower that had been for decades an adversary of the West’ (2007b: 892, original emphasis). The results of this undertaking were not far short of disastrous, and the decade of 1989–99 became known as the time of political paralysis in the absence of any political infrastructure, as well as of great economic instability and decline. Whereas, in theory, the monopoly of the Communist Party was superseded by political pluralism, in practice, ‘ideology took a back seat to market reforms, competition, and repudiation of government control’ (Cohen, 2006: 1). As documented by Zassoursky, this was particularly true for the second half of the 1990s when a number of political formations established by the governing elites lacked a coherent programme or ‘any rooting in the society’ (2004: 75). Only the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF/KPRF) proved to be an exception in this regard by presenting a more or less unified opposition front, which, however, was not free from ideological contradictions and instability (March, 2002; White, 2011).

From 1996 onwa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Perspectives on Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis
• 3 Sociolinguistic Patterns and Discursive Stages in Post-Soviet Russia
• 4 Compilation of Specialised Corpora
• 5 Analysis of Quantitative Trends
• 6 Diachronic Study of Paraphrases
• 7 Metaphor Use in Political Speeches
• 8 Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix 1: Collocational Profiles of the Loanwords
• Appendix 2: Colligational Patterning of the Loanwords in the CPOP
• Notes
• References
• Index