Argument for a nationality in the Russian parliamentary rhetoric (on the material of the discussions in the State Duma of the Russian Empire)

The article is devoted to revealing the persuasive potential of the national argument in the State Duma of the Russian Empire. The aim of the article is identification of the specifics of the argument system in the Russian parliamentary debate, which the author called ‘argument for a nationality', and analysis of options of this argument type. The basis of the research methodology is discursive and logical-rhetorical analysis of the statements, which were reflected in the transcripts of the Russian pre-revolutionary Duma. At the first stage, a thematic selection of discursive units which contained references to nations, nationalities and ethnic groups was made. Then their logical-rhetorical status (thesis, argument, invective) was assessed and units which did not possess the property of an argument were excluded. At the second stage, the selected units were classified and typologized according to the semantic models of arguments. At the final stage, the analysis of the functioning of each model of the national argument was carried out, taking into account the specifics of the addressee of the message, the topic of the speech and the audience's reaction to the application of the argument; the prevalence of the argument models in the Duma discussion was estimated. The source of the empirical material was the published verbatim records of the debate of the State Duma of the first, second, third and fourth convocations (1906-1917). A total of 83 texts, which represent the detailed speeches of deputies and members of the government from the rostrum, as well as the replicas recorded in the transcripts from the hall, were selected and analyzed. According to the results of the study, the author came to the following conclusions. The author understands the term ‘argument for a nationality' as a persuasive complex of dissimilar arguments connected with the method of persuasion by appealing to such mental categories as national consciousness, national spirit, national character, national identity, and the historical formation of the nation, that is, various kinds of phenomena related to ethnic identification in the broad sense of this term. The argument for a nationality was widely used in the Russian parliamentary debate and was part of the discourse representatives' core tools of persuasion. The most frequent models of the realization of the argument for a nationality in the speeches of the Duma speakers are as follows. 1. The argument for a victim nation. 2. The argument for national weakness. 3. The argument for the ‘Russian heart'. 4. The argument for the history. 5. The argument for authority. The shorthand transcripts of the meetings of the State Duma reveal the diversity of the manifestations of the argument for a nationality and the creative approach of the deputies to the comprehension of the ‘national question' in order to prove various kinds of theses, which were not always connected with ethnic problems.

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