Objections Proffering Choices: Negation in the Co-Construction of Political Identity by Rival Partisans in the Russian State Duma
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Richard Anderson
Summary
Legislatures are often seen as fostering democracy by counterbalancing executive power. Crippled by constitutional restraints on its powers and by electoral fraud that guarantees the dominance of a single party loyal to the sitting president, the Russian State Duma seems an unsatisfactory counterweight. But a legislature also fosters democracy by acting as a megaphone reminding voters that they retain choices among opposed political identities. Because syntactic negation works by formulating a positive proposition to which introduction of a negative particle expresses some unspecified objection, every negative sentence presents an audience with at least two alternatives – and because the unspecified feature of the objection renders construal indeterminate, actually many more than two. If so, when Duma deputies address each other with negation, they co-construct alternatives before the public, preserving awareness of democratic choice even when fraud vitiates it in practice.
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Aufsätze
- Preface
- Linguistic Violence in Contemporary Russian Public Discourses
- Objections Proffering Choices: Negation in the Co-Construction of Political Identity by Rival Partisans in the Russian State Duma
- Posing Questions without Asking
- Patriotyzm genetyczny, półka kulturowa and Palikotyzacja X-a – blends as catchwords in Polish political discourse
- Hashtag Poetics: Political humour on Russian Twitter
- Quotations, intertextual references, models and myths in the presidential debate of the Czech Parliament
- Interdiscursive strategies of metaphor-driven rhetoric in Romanian discourses on a political crisis
- Intertextual references in British, German and Russian political interviews and blogs
- Types and functions of intertextual references in the Russian State Duma
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Aufsätze
- Preface
- Linguistic Violence in Contemporary Russian Public Discourses
- Objections Proffering Choices: Negation in the Co-Construction of Political Identity by Rival Partisans in the Russian State Duma
- Posing Questions without Asking
- Patriotyzm genetyczny, półka kulturowa and Palikotyzacja X-a – blends as catchwords in Polish political discourse
- Hashtag Poetics: Political humour on Russian Twitter
- Quotations, intertextual references, models and myths in the presidential debate of the Czech Parliament
- Interdiscursive strategies of metaphor-driven rhetoric in Romanian discourses on a political crisis
- Intertextual references in British, German and Russian political interviews and blogs
- Types and functions of intertextual references in the Russian State Duma
