KEYWORD EINHEIT AS A MARKER OF GERMANY’S POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Abstract

The study presents a multi-level discourse analysis of the keyword Einheit (at the intratextual and transtextual levels and at the level of actors). The article uses the methods of linguistic description, contextual and corpus analysis of keywords of political discourse. The publication material was a corpus of contexts of the keyword Einheit, made by the authors on the base of political texts of various types (speeches of politicians, memoirs and biographies, texts of party programs, publications in press etc.). Firstly, the authors focus on the morphological, lexical-semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of the keyword Einheit, codified in lexicographical sources. Secondly, the authors study the features of the actualization of the Einheit lexeme as a marker of political discourse in specific use, taking into account the historical and political events that took place in post-war Germany, during the existence of two German states (GDR and FRG), as well as in the united Germany after 1990. The semantic and pragmatic variability and range of interpretations of the keyword Einheit is investigated involving historical and cultural information. In addition, the authors refer to the peculiarities of synonymy and distribution of the lexeme in political discourse, which manifest themselves in the variability and changing frequency of its co-content components. These components, accompanied the keyword Einheit in the analyzed text fragments are an integral part of their thematic deployment and pragmatic focusing, for example, Wiedervereinigung, Einigung Deutschlands, die innere Einheit, Deutsche Einheit etc. The authors come to the conclusion that the key word under study is highly relevant for the political discourse of Germany both from the standpoint of diachronic discourse analysis and in the context of the study of contemporary social and communicative practices.

Keywords:

дискурс-анализ, лексикография, политическая лингвистика, тип текста, прагматика, дискурс объединения, послевоенный дискурс Германии