SEMIOTICS OF SOCIAL AND ETHICAL COMMUNICATION

Abstract

This article examines socio-ethical discourse from the point of view of its pragmatic goals and functional links with discourses of other types. The author focuses on such as linguistic and semiotic characteristics of socio-ethical discourse as the ideological nature of the reference, communicativism of semiotic relations, emotionally-manipulative pragmatics of content, and the cultural and symbolic significance of the form. From a standpoint of function, socio-ethical discourse is predominantly communicative, the expression within it is subordinated to communication and is reduced mainly to ideological positioning. The goal of social and ethical communication is to control emotions and interpersonal relationships. In the social and ethical sense of comprehension of the content, the emotional form and the apparent severity of the estimates are much more important than informational content. Social life from the semiotic point of view is a symbolic type of activity. The language of public discourse cannot consist of only some characters. Much more in it are symbolically marked nominative signs (journalistic cliches, political and journalistic stamps, ideological patterns and stereotypes of education). Their function is so specific that they can form an independent subsystem (social dialect, micro language) within the general language standard. The main formal features of social and ethical discourse are its saturation with rhetorical and expressive speech patterns, emotionally marked and figurative linguistic units, phraseologisms, quotations and precedent texts.