Linguistic interpretation of the political correctness crisis in mass media discourse

Abstract

The object of the authors’ interest in this work is the phenomenon of non-politically correct communication. We consider the linguistic means representing it as the political correctness crisis markers. In this article, we study them in the communicative space of the English-language mass media discourse and focus on the connections between these linguistic means and the cognitive aspects of their functioning. To reach the aim (to identify the linguistic means representing the political correctness crisis in the English-language mass media discourse and to disclose their interpretative potential) we make an attempt to discover the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms of interpreting violations of political correctness norms in the discursive space of the English-language mass media, as well as the additional linguistic and extralinguistic factors that contribute to the formation of politically incorrect senses. The results obtained show that the linguistic mechanisms of such interpretation is the connotation in the lexical unit semantics; the cognitive mechanisms involved in the discourse interpretation are focusing and defocusing. Linguistic context of the utterance and individual and collective knowledge about the world - as additional factors of interpretation contribute to the conceptual structures content configuration, actualising certain meanings and senses, ensuring the discourse interpretation of the event described in the media text as having features violating the politically correct communication norms. The novelty of this research is related to the study of the issue from the theoretical and methodological perspective of the cognitive-discursive approach. The present study is theoretically significant as it can contribute to the development of both, the general theory of linguistic interpretation, and the methodology of the theory of discursive interpretation.