DECONSTRUCTION OF IDEOLOGICAL DICHOTOMY IN EDITORIAL DISCOURSE (BASED ON THE WASHINGTON POST)

Abstract

The article is dedicated to decoding ideological attitudes in editorial texts through the deconstruction of discourse by means of discourse analysis. The analysis of the thematic and architectonic structures of discourse in conjunction with contextual information – the social situation and knowledge representation – and the examination of specific units of speech have revealed implicit ideological beliefs the discourse manifestation of which is usually veiled. Due consideration has been given to the nature of ideology, which has social and cognitive dimensions and represents a version of the world model for a certain social group determining the worldview of its participants. Ideological attitudes form the basis for the dichotomy «we» – «they». Its manifestation is traced both at the macrolevel of discourse – in the thematic structure of the text, through the distribution of information within the components of the invariant model of an editorial, in the actualization of the ideologeme – and at the microlevel of discourse by means of decoding local semantics, meanings of words and sentences. The model of an editorial determines structuring the information within the text, providing a framework for verbalizing the message by using the means of speech which reveal the addresser’s stance. Evaluation, as one of the key categories of ideological discourse, is already manifested in the headline and the summary as they define the perspective from which the event is interpreted. A special role in the realization of dichotomy is attributed to the principle of relevance structuring which contributes to the development of the enemy ideologeme. It has been inferred that ideological dichotomy «we» – «they», which is one of the major cognitive categories governing the principles of cognition and perception of the reality, is actualized in discourse reflecting the addresser’s pragmatic intention: to convey the attitude to an event, a phenomenon, or a person and to convince the addressee of the validity of this attitude by verbalizing the information in a certain way and directing the interpretation.