Discursive Mechanisms of Speech Manipulation in German–Language Political Discourse on the Example of the Conceptual Opposition “Government – People”.

The article is devoted to the issue of scientific and theoretical description of discursive means for achieving communicative success in political discourse through speech manipulation based on the conceptual opposition “government – people”. The purpose of this article is to identify lexemes representing the concepts of “government – people” in German political discourse. The relevance of the study is justified by the increase in the number of texts of a political orientation, but at the same time by a fragmentary study of the binary conceptual opposition “government – people”. The scientific novelty lies in the fact that in this work an attempt is made to establish the discursive specifics of the use of the conceptual opposition “government – people” as a mean of manipulating consciousness in its correlation with relevant linguistic and statistical data. The theoretical part of the article is to consider the concepts of speech influence and conceptual oppositions as a tool of manipulation. In the practical part, statistical data are presented that reflect the most frequent lexemes-representatives of the concepts under study. The research material is presented by the official political speeches of the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. As a result, data were obtained on the conceptual opposition “government – people”, which reflects the institutional aspect of the interaction of subjects of political communication. The significance of the results obtained lies in the applicability of the data obtained to effectively counteract manipulative speech influence in political discourse.

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