Phraseological and paroemiological units as means of linguistic manipulation in political communication
The article presents phraseological and paroemiological units in respect of linguistic manipulation and their functioning in political communication. Proverbs and idioms reflect mental, social, cultural and everyday experience and represent ways of pragmalinguistic, cultural, and social linguistic manipulation. They are widely used in modern political communication because of their semantic succinctness, allegorical character, fixedness, contiguity, and expressiveness. The author describes semantic features of these units, reveals their functional differences in comparison with non-phraseological collocations through the example of public speeches of the American politicians. The special emphasis is given to the fact that the use of phraseological and paremiological units is determined by the intension of phraseological (figurative) nomination, a need to reduce recipient's involvement into the situation, a general desire to use units of weak informative value and with conventionally fixed evaluation. The use of proverbs and idioms makes a politician sound less judgemental, opinionated, and personally involved. The author comes to a conclusion that, in political communication, phraseological and paroemiological units are general means of linguistic manipulation primarily representing indirect and hidden influence in a form appeal, evaluation, proof or argumentation. These linguistic units have expressive, influencing, evaluative and generalizing capacities.