STRATEGIES AND TACTICS IN RUSSIAN POLITICAL AND MEDIA DISCOURSE COVID-19: A CASE STUDY OF V.V. PUTIN’S SPEECH AND RUSSIAN NATIONAL CORPUS

Abstract

The article examines strategies and tactics of political and media discourse on the coronavirus based on the material of President Vladimir V. Putin’s speech of 25.03.2020 and statements with the keywords “covid/coron(o)virus” from the Central Media Subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. By identifying the linguistic strategies and tactics of political and media discourse, the authors attempted to reveal similarities and differences in the techniques of implementing communicative strategies and tactics. In political and media discourse during the 1st wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, such strategies and tactics as informational-interpretive strategy (tactics of acknowledging the existence of the problem, accentuating positive information, indicating the way of solving the problem and attribution), strategy of forming the emotional mood of the addressee (tactics of appealing to the addressee’s emotions and considering his value orientations), legitimation strategy (tactics of appealing to authority). Within them, the informational-interpretive strategy and its tactics are fundamental prerequisites for further strategies and tactics to be used in speech.