Abstract

The problem of political discourse genre specificity has been in the center of attention of Russian and foreign scholars, which is determined by the relevance of political discourse as a multidimensional object of study with its linguistic properties in particular. The ambiguity of principles for genre gradation of political discourse is linked to the variability of understanding genre proper. The definition of genre as goal-oriented text characteristics allows accentuating some genres of political discourse depending on their subject content. Herewith, its distinctive feature will be the purposeful content of the utterance. Apart from that, the proposed gradation is based on the principle of considering political activity, which determines a person’s communication in a certain situation. In accordance with the above principles, we propose to differentiate between the following genres of political discourse: information genres; persuasive; invocatory genres; apology/repentance genre. The specificity of genres of political discourse is determined by the leading intentions of the utterance as well as the type of dicteme as a text thematization unit where speech acts are realized. For each of the proposed genre groups there are dictemes of different types where the subject content of the utterance is actualized. Propaganda as spread of a certain political ideology, views and beliefs can characterize all genres of political discourse.