“Look at all those nouns in a row"—authoritarianism, democracy, and the iconicity of political Russian

Language and Politics in Post-Soviet Russia

“…By contrast, the transition to the multiparty system highlighted the role of language in political campaigns, calling for dismantling of the authoritarian mode of discourse and using new linguistic devices to engage the electorate. As a result, as Anderson (1996) observes, the distance separating the register of politics from standard Russian was reduced by Gorbachev, and eventually eliminated by electoral politicians in the post-Soviet era.…”

Verbos y sustantivos en textos científicos. Análisis de variación en un corpus de textos de ciencias aplicadas, naturales, sociales y humanidades

“…Más ampliamente, Heylighen y Dewaele (2002) plantean que los sustantivos comunes son más frecuentes en textos con baja dependencia de contexto (instancias de expresión "formal" 7 ) mientras que los verbos son más frecuentes en estilos fuertemente contextuales. Como recuerda Anderson (1996), la mayor frecuencia de sustantivos comunes respecto de verbos finitos suele indicar mayor longitud de las oraciones, lo que podría, a su vez, connotar una mayor distancia entre los participantes del discurso. Desde esta perspectiva, la razón entre sustantivos y verbos podría indicar cierta posición en el continuo distanciacompromiso.…”

Metaphors of Dictatorship and Democracy: Change in the Russian Political Lexicon and the Transformation of Russian Politics

“…More important, society emerges as a site for actions separate from those of the party or as an actor capable of i n d e p e n d e n t agency, as in (12) or (13), both from speeches by Gorbachev: (In the party, and in the society as a whole, too, . .…”

“…10 In separate papers my colleagues and I have reported experimental evidence that whole texts exemplifying those used in the present study evoke very different responses from large samples of Russian readers and that the electoral texts are more capable of evoking identification. 11 Although the whole texts used in those experiments include many cues other than metaphors (some of which I have analyzed in other papers), 12 it is known that metaphors are important cues used in deciding what a text means. Exactly how to describe the changes in the meaning that Russian audiences infer when they see democratic instead of dictatorial metaphors and how far-reaching these changes may be are admittedly open to more investigation, but one cannot put different metaphors in and get the same meaning out.…”