Linguistic Peculiarities of Creolized Texts in Military-Political Discourse
Well-judged representation of information is the key to success of any action that involves communication, especially if this information serves to create the image of some public agency. Since 2018, the Ministry of Defense of Russia has been publishing creolized texts (humorous military calendars and postcards) containing conflictogenes - words and word combinations that may cause conflicts - which are often used to make a play on words. The authors analyzed 114 creolized texts: 72 were taken from military calendars published in 2018-2022; 12 were postcards issued by the Ministry of Defense to honor Russia’s Defender of the Fatherland Day (23 February), and 30 more creolized texts were taken from military calendars published in 2015-2017. 85 % of these creolized texts contain play on words (on various levels of language) to create humor and attract readers’ attention. In most cases, these texts include a combination of various types of wordplay used simultaneously, frequently on both graphic and verbal levels. The most frequent is the wordplay on the lexical level, created using polysemy and homonyms that mix military professionalisms and military jargon with commonly used words. If phraseological units are used, wordplay utilizes the direct meaning of each member, thus transforming phraseological units into mere word combinations, so that intent becomes clear only when considering both the verbal and the graphic parts of the creolized text. The expressive potential of creolized texts is often enhanced by allusions to precedent phenomena (popular films, books, music, animated shorts, etc.), giving a variety of additional meanings which cannot be interpreted without the corresponding background knowledge. All of these techniques are utilized to create the image of the Russian army as modern and battleworthy and to further boost the status of military professionals by implying a high level of culture and education required and cultivated in the military.