Discourse-World Macrostructure of the Political Event

Abstract

The paper focuses on modeling the macrostructure of discourse-world of the political event as derived from G20 Leaders’ Declaration and publications united by the theme of 2017 summit. The purpose of the authors is to reveal basic macroframes that are viewed as cognitive ‘pillars’ of discourse world of one of the most crucial political events of the past year – international forum for economic cooperation. The notion of discourse world macrostructure draws on World-Modelling Theory initially inspired by Text-World Theory, introduced by Werth, Gavins, Semino and then expanded upon contemporary cognitive-discourse approaches proposed by Russian scholars Kubryakova, Boldyrev, Demyankov, and Socio-cognitive Theory of discourse, introduced by van Dijk. Discourse world of political event is treated as representational structure of discourse having its macrostructure that is made explicit on the level of discourse topics. It is argued that global economic challenges specify basic macroframes that constitute the macrostructure of the discourse world. In the present research, the established macroframes are grouped into three cognitive-semantic fields – ‘Man and Society’, ‘Man and Nature’, and ‘World Economy’. It is proved that discourse world macrostructure has economic ideology and political intentions behind the linguistic expressions. Correlations are found between discourse world macrostructure of the political event and major political and economic initiatives aimed at changing for the better economic life of the global community. The conclusions might present interest for further investigation of the socially-determined discourse structures that govern the perception of the political events by mass audience.