SPEECH BEHAVIOR OF POLITICIANS (ON THE SPEECHES IN THE BRITISH PARLIAMENT DEVOTED TO BREXIT)

The article is devoted to the pragmalinguistic analysis of the UK
parliamentarians’ speech behavior. The objectives of this work
are to diagnose and identify some of the individual personal
qualities of the UK politicians with the help of conducting a
research based on the methods of Implicit Pragmalinguistics.
There is a detailed examination of the stereotypical speech
behavior of the statesmen groups which depends on their
membership in a political party. In the course of the study, the
method of objective pragmalinguistic analysis and modified
content analysis were used. In order for the results of a
pragmalinguistic study to be as objective as possible, it is
necessary to identify texts that are most similar in terms of
internal content and general structure. Thus, compared textspeeches contain the highest number of similar, common features.
This allows one to observe sharper significant differences
between them during calculation and interpretation of the results.
Considering the above requirements, there were selected the texts
for analysis that have common features. The following positions
were taking into account: the speakers belonging to the same
Parliament House (House of Commons); homogeneity of the
speech theme (“The Government’s Plan for Brexit” dated
December 7, 2016); the nationality of the authors (all speakers
are English-speaking parliamentarians); the gender of the
speakers (all government officials are men); the same age
category of the parliamentarians; approximately equal education
level of the parliamentarians. So, the speakers differ only in their
membership in the party. As a result, speeches by seven
representatives of the Labor Party and six representatives of the
Conservative Party are studied. The research is conducted in
accordance with the implicit speech strategy “Participation / nonparticipation of communicants in a speech event”. All speeches of
parliamentarians are devoted to the topic “Brexit”, that is the exit
of Great Britain from the European Union. 1743 small syntactic
groups were analyzed. The result of the study was the revealed
features of the majority of parliamentarians. In the course of the
analysis, not only the individual speech behavior of 13 politicians
was studied, but conclusions were also drawn about the
stereotypical speech behavior of representatives of the two
leading parties in Britain: Conservative and Labor. There is not
only a quantitative predominance of the representatives of the
ruling Conservative party in the British Parliament, but, if it can
be said so, qualitative. Conservatives subconsciously seek to
seize leadership, influencing the audience by the power of their
authority. Their indicators of the personal plan considerably
surpass the level of the social plan. The labourists are
distinguished by a cooperative type of behavior. It can be
concluded that, in general, parliamentarians are those people who
are characterized by authoritarianism and upholding their point of
view. In general, the politicians of the UK are initiative, selfconfident. They tend to concentrate on a meaningful, objective
aspect of the issue at hand, they are cooperative, have the skills to
find an individual approach to people. This research is of
particular importance for those who study in detail the problems
of establishing the authorship of the text, the problems of political
linguistic research, as well as the problems of psychological and
pragmalinguistic diagnostics of an individual in the sphere of
politics.
Keywords: Pragmalinguistics, individual speech behavior,
stereotyped speech behavior, UK Parliament, Brexit