MANIPULATION AS A FORM OF LINGUISTIC INFLUENCE BY MEANS OF A POLITICAL ANECDOTE

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of manipulative strategies and tactics in political discourse by means of anecdotes. Political anecdote plays the role of one of the varieties of mass communication, which includes informative, imaginative, expressive and suggestive texts addressed to certain groups of people in order to encourage, support or discredit a political force or individual politicians. Traditionally, anecdotes belong to modern folklore forms, the main criteria of which are applied nature, anonymity, comic nature and syntheticity. According to the functional criterion, the author distinguishes image, informative, casual and situational types of political anecdote. It is proved that a political anecdote implies the existence of an influential addressee who is able to use a diverse arsenal of linguistic and stylistic means presented in the format of a relatively concise message to achieve a humorous impact on the addressee and control his/her mental activity. To achieve this goal, the authors of political jokes use the following linguistic tools: emotional vocabulary, jargon, abbreviations, spelling and punctuation errors, repetitions, elements of wordplay, anaphors, antitheses, inversions, rhetorical questions, ellipses, epiphors, segmented structures and paraphrases. It is established that political anecdote performs a number of specific functions, which include: informational and cognitive, affiliative and integrative, entertainment and game, projection and compensatory, social control, and tactical.