Expressing personal meaning in modern political discourse: lexical aspect

The purpose of the paper is to investigate some lexical means of expressing personal meaning in political discourse based on the Russian language. We define the notion ‘personal meaning’ in various aspects, focus on its sources in different utterances: ambiguousness of reality, the bias in a person’s objective picture of the world, creation of personal worlds in the process of creativity and constant expansion of knowledge. We draw special attention to the peculiarities of political discourse and some means of expressing personal meaning in it. In the practical part of the paper we present some vivid examples that express a personal meaning of the speaker: political lexis that can have positive and negative connotation, neologisms, borrowed words, jargonistic words, etc. Some examples of generalization as one more way of expressing personal meaning are given in the paper. The lexemes that have a general meaning may have a derogative connotation. Finally, we make a conclusion that personal meaning is a vital part of any text and a political text in particular. It expresses the intention of the author and it is usually verbalized in the text through diversity of lexical units. The results of the given research could be interesting for the investigators of the discourse and political discourse in particular on the subject of expressing personal meaning in it.