Nomination of Russian Politicians in Electoral Campaign Texts

Abstract

The research is focused on the analysis of nominations of Russian politicians, in particular, the candidates for the presidency of Russian Federation in the texts of electoral campaign. The relevance of the chosen topic is determined by the fact that discovering of the patterns for nominating the politicians reflects the speech image and the speech culture of the modern Russian political elite and also provides the possibility to track the main language models of these nominations. The problem of female politicians’ nominations is the important aspect of such nomination because androcentric component which appears in domination of male nominations still prevails in the modern Russian language. Structural and semantic types of Russian politicians’ nominations in electoral campaign texts were highlighted in our research. Simple (synthetic) type of nomination was represented by such units as candidate and politician. We have discovered that complex (analytical) structural type splits into two subtypes – nomination models “denotation +attribute” and “denotation + object”. Both subtypes are common for description of all candidates. Such extra linguistic motivating factors connected to politicians as participation in the electoral campaign, the main occupation, family status, gender characteristic, appearance form the base to unite nominative units into semantic types. Our material demonstrates that nomination according to the electoral campaign activity and nomination according to the main occupation are the most significant semantic types.