The present monograph documents and analyses the contemporary trends in public communication over the last decades which the general public, i.e., speakers outside the field of linguistics and cultural studies, has interpreted intuitively...
moreThe present monograph documents and analyses the contemporary trends in public communication over the last decades which the general public, i.e., speakers outside the field of linguistics and cultural studies, has interpreted intuitively as “worsening” and “lowering of standards”. It focuses on expressivity in public discourse in Czech and Polish, monitored for the period between the end of the World War II and the present. The use of expressivity and vulgarisms in public communication has been studied in an extensive corpus of both written and spoken texts and analysed from quantitative as well as qualitative perspective. The researchers’ main intention was to characterize the linguistic means of expressivity and to learn which linguistic planes are employed most frequently for these communicative purposes. The essential part of the monograph discusses the texts produced after 1989 during the restoration of democracy in Central Europe that record political discourse in the media. Besides, these studies examine the cases when media give floor to non-professional speakers who do not have any contract to the particular medium. The research in political discourse points out to quite a strong tendency of the speakers in political debates to avoid relevant arguments (ad rem ideas) and replace them with false statements threatening or damaging the hearer’s face (ad hominem fallacies). Another typical feature of the political discourse (and public discourse in general) after 1989 is personalizing. Politicians utilise social network sites to create the illusion of intimacy by addressing every elector seemingly “in person”. Their communicative pseudo-strategies include discussing the topics which are normally excluded from TV channels discourses (ostracization of ethnic, religious or sexual minorities, etc.) and typically associated with stylistically marked expressions. The use of expressivity and vulgarisms in present-day public discourse is confronted with the recent history: in particular with Communist newspeak and 1960s/70s media discourse reflecting on some high-profile social and political issues, e.g., men’s long haircuts or the role of religion and church in the society. The analyses of the newspaper texts, echoing the official ideology, indicate that the regime was reluctant to admit the lack of control over such social phenomena and, consequently, label them as an “import” from behind the Iron Curtain. Two studies on expressivity and verbal aggressiveness in present-day Polish public communication set the topic into the international frame. They primarily test the assumption that the intellectual horizons of interlocutors are limited by the medium, i.e., the online environment. The research focuses on two events: first, the burning of books by J. K. Rowling and S. Meyer and of other pop-culture items organized by Polish priests that was widely discussed on Facebook; second, the anti-government protest in Prague described in the Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza in June 2019 that was commented by over 500 readers on the magazine website. The identification of specific communicative strategies confirmed that the mode of communication (the internet) influences the quality of discourse.
