Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
1 - The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Discourse of Argumentation in Totalitarian Language and Post-Soviet Communication Failures
- 2 Russian and Newspeak: Between Myth and Reality
- 3 ‘A Society that Speaks Concordantly’, or Mechanisms of Communication of Government and Society in Old and New Russia
- 4 Legal Literature ‘for the People’ and the Use of Language (Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century)
- 5 ‘How to Write to the Newspaper’: Language and Power at the Birth of Soviet Public Language
- 6 Between the Street and the Kitchen: The Rhetoric of the Social(ist) Meeting in Literature and Cinema
- 7 Was Official Discourse Hegemonic?
- 8 Attempts to Overcome ‘Public Aphasia’: A Study of Public Discussions in Russia at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century
- 9 Allotment Associations in Search of a New Meaning
- 10 ‘Distances of Vast Dimensions …’: Official versus Public Language (Material from Meetings of the Organising Committees of Mass Events, January–February 2012)
- 11 Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)
- 12 Distorted Speech and Aphasia in Satirical Counterdiscourse: Oleg Kozyrev's ‘Rulitiki’ Internet Videos
- 13 The Past and Future of Russian Public Language
- Notes on Contributors
- Subject Index
- Name Index
Summary
In the middle of the 1970s I made the acquaintance of a young graduate student from Sweden, who was spending a period of study at Pushkin House and had by that time already lived several months in Leningrad. His spoken Russian was good, and during these months he had made friends with half the city and was always being invited to different places. In the course of one conversation with me he made a remark which I remember to this day: ‘You Russians have a peculiar way of arguing. When people argue in Sweden, one of them speaks and the others listen and try to understand what he means. But here one person speaks, and the others wait their turn.’ I was struck with the accuracy of the expression. This was my first, unconscious encounter with a phenomenon that I learnt the names of twenty years later: analysis of communicative interaction, conversational analysis, ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1962), sequence of utterances, change of turn (Hudson 1990: 116–21), overlap (Tannen 1982: 219), and so on. That is what this introductory chapter is concerned with: the traditional peculiarities of a ‘Russian argument’ and the contemporary peculiarities of the discourse of argumentation and their consequences for the future.
Two reservations must be expressed from the start:
The subject of this chapter is what is known in sociolinguistics as register. This term is sometimes used in its strict sense, and sometimes with considerable latitude as a synonym for such terms as genre, style or type of text. In its general scope a register is a variant of language that is contingent on the situation: people switch registers in their speech depending on the situation in which they find themselves speaking (where, with whom and about what; cf. Fishman 1965). The speakers of any language are usually competent in many registers within that language and able to switch freely from one to another depending on the situation. In this respect a register is different from a (social) dialect, since the latter is more tightly bound to the speaker's identity (see Biber 1994 for more detail).
The chapter will treat only of that type of communication that aims at first bringing a group of people to a common opinion on a particular issue, and then, potentially, urging them to joint action.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Public Debate in RussiaMatters of (Dis)order, pp. 10 - 30Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016