THE SPECIFICS OF THE REPRESENTATION OF IRONY IN MODERN BRITISH POLITICAL MEDIA DISCOURSE
Keywords:
political discourse, postmodern multimedia picture of the world, irony, ironic sense, stylistic devicesAbstract
The article explores irony in political discourse as a manifestation of the general attitudes of postmodern self-consciousness. It has been found that the phenomenon of irony in political discourse is a model of the modern world-view of political realities as semantically ambiguous, intertextual, culturally-conditioned components of the postmodern multimedia picture of the world. The approach to irony as a synthesis of the ideological process and a linguistic phenomenon made it possible to describe the mechanism of the functioning of irony in the British political media discourse. Irony can be realized by means of all linguistic levels, provided they are used in contexts that have a semantic ambiguity. The stylistic devices of creating ironic sense in the British political media discourse are mainly metaphors, paraphrases, paradoxes, bringing to the point of absurdity. A significant feature of modern political discourse is the irony of the allusion and quotation types. Different quotations, allusions, reminiscences, which are peculiar "texts in the text", expand the intertextual framework of a political article and function as mechanisms for the realization of irony. In the British political media discourse the intensity of ironic mock can be different: its degree varies from mild, friendly and benevolent to evil, caustic, sarcastic. The degree of ridicule depends on the emotional intensity of the criticism that the irony conveys.
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