Pragmatic Markers in Media and Political Discourse

This paper explores the usage of such lexical units as pragmatic markers in speech of famous politicians and journalists. The term pragmatic marker is rather poorly studied in Russian linguistics. Meanwhile, these lexical units are integral part of spontaneous spoken speech and the frequency of pragmatic markers in speech exceeds that of almost all content words [3]. There were some attempts to analyze and classify pragmatic markers in Russian everyday speech, but their functioning in other spheres of discourse are not studied enough. Besides, it is always relevant to analyze the media and political discourse due to the fact that politicians and journalists, being authoritative and famous personalities, usually represent a culture of speech for ordinary people. This paper is aimed to present the specific usage of pragmatic markers in media and political discourse. Thus, in the presented work we will try to collect data with professional tool for the creation of complex annotations on video and audio resources and describe it with theoretical background. We will use content and discourse analysis, a statistical method and a method of analyzing scientific literature. The results showed that pragmatic markers are found in the speeches of politicians and journalists quite often, but there is no obvious relationship between the speaker and the frequency in the usage of pragmatic markers. Keywords: pragmatic markers, discourse, discourse markers, spoken dialogue, the Russian language, political discourse, media discourse