THE ROLE OF PRECEDENT phenomena IN THE PROCESS OF MENTAL SPACE FORMATION (based on the comparative analysis of V.V. Putin and B. Obama discourses)
This research is made within the scope of political discoursology research area, oriented to study the national mental space of the Russians and the Americans on the ground of the national representatives’ speeches - the presidents of Russia and the USA. This article aims to perform the comparative cognitive research of application mechanism of the precedent names and phenomena in the political discourse of Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama. The cognitive approach to the political discourse intends to study its mental structures including stereotyped and standard conceptualization of the political world which are distinguished by its structure and image-bearing emotional stability. In particular, the research recognizes stereotyped images of different national and ethnical communities, separate countries, dual stereotypes such as “insiders and outsiders”, “us and them” creating the images of “friends and enemies”. The public materials of the mentioned countries’ leaders on the summit G20 in Saint-Petersburg in 2013 have been compared, the important aspects of the culturally determined knowledge existence and conceptualization have been consequently studied. The linguistic analysis of the political discourse in general and the political speech in particular can be successful on condition of taking into account the details of both linguistic and political behavior. Lexical-semantic approach to the political discourse analysis aims to study the lexical items of the specific political speeches and texts. The author is focused on the precedent phenomena-representations of the mental space. The results of the comparative analysis provide the opportunity to define the viewed extract of the national mental space and to emphasize the general characteristics and national peculiarities relevant to the representatives of the Russian and American political elite.