Study of the speech behavior of a modern Russian diplomat with the use of traditional and digital methods of analysis: comparative aspect (based on the speeches of V.Churkin and V.Nebenzya)

The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis is to identify and compare the key characteristics of the speech behavior of two Russian diplomats - Vitaly Ivanovich Churkin and Vasily Alekseevich Nebenzya - representing the Russian Federation during the period of their service in the Russian delegation of the United Nations Security Council. As research objectives, we studied the scientific and theoretical basis of the concepts of “speech portrait” and “speech behavior”; identified the features of diplomatic discourse; identified, classified and described various linguistic means used by diplomats to achieve the goals of diplomatic communication; identified the linguistic means used by diplomats, such as dichotomous fields, strategies and tactics; Recordings of speeches publicly available on the United Nations Digital Library website were selected as research material. For each of the two politicians, with the help of the AntConc corpus manager, two corpora of 50 speeches each was collected, with a total of 100 speeches and approximately 88 thousand tokens/wordforms. To study strategies and tactics, a “small corpus” was also compiled with a total amount of words of 20 thousand, which was easier to analyse due to its volume. The collected language material was processed automatically and manually. Automatic processing involved working in a corpus manager (compiling frequency lists, searching for colocates, compiling concordances) and creating a Python program for lemmatization and reprocessing lemmatized text. Manual processing implied a complete reading of the texts, taking into account the contextual content of statements, identifying the semantic components of diplomats’ statements, categorizing statements depending on the axiologemes and ideologemes they contain, nominees, speech strategies and tactics. The results of the work done are detailed descriptions of the strategies and tactics used, with analysis of quotes from diplomats' speeches, including the modality of individual lexemes within these quotes - the assignment of modality was based both on the context of the statement and on dictionary definitions. Tables were created with statistics on the frequency of use of specific word forms, ideologemes, axiologemes , strategies, and tactics. The tables also show classification and components, such as which word forms represent which ideologies, or which tactics are part of which strategies. Significant differences were identified in the expression of ideologemes and key lexemes representing dichotomous fields. It was identified that V. Churkin and V. Nebenzya use a common set of strategies, with conflict ones prevailing over cooperative ones.