Stylistic peculiarities of syntactic pleonasm in Boris Johnson’s political discourse

Abstract

A man is a social being, and he cannot fully exist without society and communication. Every person is constantly exposed to the influence, because an information and communication field is created and expanded around us every day, from which a person can receive new information every day against his own will. Political texts, speeches, speeches, the stated purpose of which is to present information about political processes, events, phenomena, etc., are the key to increasing influence on a person. The concept of discourse is interdisciplinary and goes beyond linguistics, and studies of its sphere of influence are in dynamic motion, reflecting the relationship between language and power in linguistics, sociology, and culture. Interest in it is due not only to the development and strengthening of the influence of broadcasting on the audience on the basis of commercial advertising, ideological propaganda, but also due to political speeches. But linguistic redundancy, or verbosity, is manifested in the use of more words than necessary to express an idea. It can be caused by such phenomena as pleonasm or tautology. Pleonasm and tautology are considered synonymous words, however, the second concept is a completely erroneous combination of words, while the first can be considered a special style of the author or a commonly used cliché. Therefore, the relevance of this study is due to the fact that pleonasms or pleonastic expressions, which are the result of the growing interest in them by linguists, are found in all types of situations. While language is involved, it occurs in conversations, in print media such as magazines or newspapers, in literary works such as novels, films, poetry and songs, discourses. The problem that arose in our research is that to identify pleonastic expressions in political speeches without missing at least one pleonastic expression, because when one reads or listens to speeches, some pleonastic expressions may look exactly like ordinary expressions. That is why the purpose of the study is to identify the stylistic features of syntactic pleonasm in the political discourse of Boris Johnson.