Communicative and emotive characteristics of the diplomatic idiolect

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of communicatively conditioned professional idiolect and the emotional speech of a diplomat by means of quantitative computer content analysis and semantic analysis. The characteristics of a professional diplomat’s idiolect, changes in speech that have occurred over time are determined. Particular attention is paid to lexical units, a change in connotations, the degree of overall emotional performance, as well as clichés and aphorisms. The concept of “implicitly emotive diplomatic clichés” is introduced, which is characteristic of the type of discourse under study. According to the results of the study, it is concluded that a professional idiolect is expressed in the skillful switching of speech codes, the rejection of pragmatic appraisal, the ability to explicitly express an appraisal using facts and the exact use of changing connotations, as well as implicitly emotive diplomatic clichés, which allows a diplomat through a “delegated subject” express the country’s attitude to current events, but remain within the framework of the diplomatic speech protocol. The study allows us to come closer to a clearer and deeper understanding of the phenomenon of a professional diplomat’s idiolect as a complex set of speech and textual practices aimed at solving complex international problems in a peaceful way, i.e. verbally. The research material was S.V. Lavrov as the Permanent Representative to the UN Security Council speeches on the theme of ‘peacekeeping’ stored in the Security Council digital archive for 1994—2004, as well as the material of the press conference on 01/17/2020 as the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation.