Recipient's Pre-Text Expectations as a Factor of Various Interpretations of Political Discourse

The current research has an interdisciplinary character. It encompasses the fields of interpretive linguistics, the study of non-professional political discourse and linguistic personolo-gy. The study discusses the problem of cleavage between the authorial intention embodied in a single textual form and the multiplicity of its message interpretation variants. The article aims to identify the key factors (variables) that determine the ongoing reception-production process of discourse interpretation constructed in terms of its multiplicity and variability. The authors reconstruct a descriptive pattern of the potentially interpretive functioning of discourse. Particularly, this pattern presupposes consideration of the interpretive activity of a subject (author), which correlates to the wide range of the human language-making capacity types. The discourse addressee acts as an interpreter and the interpretation results in metadiscourse production. The discourse recipient's behavior has an active, creative and performing character. This interpretive process is relatively autonomous, as it does not depend on the author's conception, being largely subjective (understanding of the self) and intentional. The study that uses the data of a linguistic interpretive experiment shows that the recipient's pretext expectations largely determine his (her) interpretation variables. Expectations comprise certain components such as the recipient's background; cognitive ability to anticipate future events which is triggered by current stimuli; determination as the addressee's intention; linguistic patterns that pre-determine the direction of expectation; text image, the implied author. The concept of the implied author acts as the mechanism which triggers the reader's interpretation of political discourse. The material used as an empirical basis for the research is discourse excerpts, particularly, Vladimir Putin's 2004 inaugural address. It served as a text stimulus for three groups of participants. The three groups received the same excerpt. The first group was informed about the true authorship details; the second group was told that the author was Petro Poroshenko; the third group was informed that the author was Ramzan Kadyrov. The experiment resulted in a cluster of interpreting texts. Their content indicated common and different semantic variants related to the interpreted texts produced by different political figures. The cluster of common semantic variants proves that the interpretation of political discourse is determined by the content of the interpreted text. However, the cluster of different semantic variants proves that interpretation is more determined by the image of a political leader (Putin / Poroshenko / Kadyrov). The recipients motivated by their pre-text expectations are predominantly affected by the author's image. Thus, they preeminently demonstrate the perceived content of the leader's speech. Generally, the addressee of political discourse is likely to anticipate a certain message in the writings of the author who is previously known (it was that political leader who was designated as the author of the interpreted address in the study). Thus, the received experimental data allow arguing that readers interpreting inaugural discourse are considerably motivated by the message of the reference discourse as well as by the implied author conception (for instance, the president's image actualized in his inaugural address).

Keywords

Authors

References