Techniques and Practices of Speech Expression in Arab Diplomatic Communication

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Techniques and Practices of Speech Expression in Arab Diplomatic Communication

E. K. Akhmatshina¹, K. Yu. Demidova², A. Yu. Bykov¹

¹ St. Petersburg State University,

St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

² National Research University Higher School of Economics,

St. Petersburg, Russian Federation

The article is devoted to analysis of the techniques and practices of speech expression in Arab diplomatic communication through the example of speeches made by Arab diplomatic corps representatives and politicians at various UN venues. Original texts of speeches made by Permanent Representatives of Arab countries at the UN concerning the situation in the Middle East were chosen as the material for the study. The time frame covers the period from 2011 to 2018. The UN's multimedia resources are one of the largest platforms for diplomatic dialogue open to the general public. Due to the intensification of relations between Russia and the Arab countries, it is necessary to identify the specifics of Arab diplomatic communication, as the speaker's statements are not intended to express his or her own attitude and assessment, but the attitude of the state he or she represents. When analyzing the texts of speeches by diplomatic corps representatives in general, we observed the interpenetration and mutual influence of several types of language styles, which depend on the specifics of the issue under discussion: officialese style, inherent in diplomatic correspondence, and publicistic, which is found in public speeches. The intermingling of styles undoubtedly affects both the lexical and syntactic weight of the texts in a statement. In turn, Arab speakers cannot remain emotionally indifferent to the problems of their region due to the difficult political situation in the Middle East. For this reason, we noted not only a regular deviation from diplomatic speech standards, primarily the abundance of emotionally evaluative vocabulary in the texts of their speeches, but also special strategies for constructing texts that help to have a certain effect directed at listeners and opponents -- expression. Among the most commonly used methods of speech expression, we have identified repetition, cohesion, convergence and the effect of defeated expectancy. By means of analysis of expressive syntaxes we studied the specifics of the use of these methods of speech expression at the level of usual-cliched Arabic text and highlighted the specifics of tapping this speech strategy in the language of Arabic diplomacy.

Keywords: modern standard Arabic, language of Arabic diplomacy, speech expression.

Приемыречевойэкспрессии в арабскойдипломатическойкоммуникации

Э. К. Ахматшина¹, К. Ю. Демидова², А. Ю. Быков¹

¹ Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет,

Российская Федерация, Санкт-Петербург

² Национальный исследовательский университет «Высшая школа экономики»,

Российская Федерация, Санкт-Петербург

В настоящей статье анализируются средства речевой экспрессии в арабской дипломатической коммуникации на примере выступлений арабских представителей дипломатического корпуса и политических деятелей на различных площадках ООН. Материалом для исследования послужили оригинальные тексты выступлений постоянных представителей арабских стран при ООН, затрагивающих ситуацию на Ближнем Востоке. Временные рамки охватывают период с 2011 по 2018 гг. Мультимедийные ресурсы ООН являются одной из крупнейших площадок для дипломатического диалога, открытой широкой общественности. Ввиду интенсификации отношений России и арабских стран возникает необходимость выявление специфики арабской дипломатической коммуникации, так как спикер в своих выступлениях призван выражать не собственное отношение и оценку, а отношение государства, которое он представляет. При анализе текстов выступлений представителей дипломатического корпуса в целом мы наблюдаем взаимопроникновение и взаимовлияние нескольких типов языковых стилей: официально-делового, присущего дипломатической переписке, и публицистического, присущего публичным выступлениям, в зависимости от специфики обсуждаемого вопроса. Смешение стилей, несомненно, отражается как на лексической, так и на синтаксической нагрузках текстов. В свою очередь, арабские спикеры в силу сложных условий сложившейся политической обстановки на Ближнем Востоке не могут оставаться эмоционально равнодушными к проблемам их региона. В этой связи мы фиксируем в выступлениях арабских дипломатов не только регулярное отступление от принятых в дипломатии речевых стандартов (к примеру, обилие эмоционально-оценочной лексики в текстах выступлений), но и особую стратегию построения текстов, способствующую созданию определенного эффекта на слушателей и оппонентов, -- экспрессию. Среди наиболее часто используемых приемов речевой экспрессии мы выделили повтор, сцепление, конвергенцию и прием обманутого ожидания. Посредством анализа экспрессивного синтаксиса мы изучили специфику использования указанных приемов речевой экспрессивности на уровне узуально-клишированного арабского текста и выделили особенности применения данной речевой стратегии в языке арабской дипломатии.

Ключевыеслова: арабский литературный язык, язык арабской дипломатии, речевая экспрессия.

Introduction

The purpose of this research is to study the techniques and practices of expression in Arab diplomatic communication at the level of text organization of speakers' statements. The relevance of the paper is dictated by the fact that there are few works in modern linguistics devoted to the analysis of diplomatic discourse and oral diplomatic communication in general and the means of expression in it in particular. speech expression arabic diplomatic

For modern linguistics, studying the specifics of a diplomatic language in its cultural and historical environment is valuable. Despite its static character, the diplomatic language develops following changes in the foreign and domestic policy of states, as well as changes in the international arena. A special category in the characteristics of the diplomatic language is occupied by public speeches of the diplomatic corps representatives. Due to the specifics of their activities, they are forced to speak about the position of their state in front of an audience, given the limitations imposed on them by the peculiarities of the diplomatic sphere of communication and the diplomatic language. Diplomatic communication, as well as any oral communication, is characterized by strategicity. An oral strategy is “a set of speech actions aimed at achieving a communicative goal” [1, p. 54]. It requires a range of defined tactics and strategies to achieve a predictable result in, for example, negotiations.

In controversial political situations, such tactics are used by diplomats to create “uncertainty” and ambiguity in order to be able to have, in the words of the researcher H. Tra- belsi, an “emergency exit” regardless of the course of events [2, p. 4].

As in any communication, the sender of a message wants to convey as much information as possible and be understood, so he or she resorts to a variety of stylistic devices that increase the impact on the audience. Furthermore, despite the diplomatic language's tendency for objectivity and impersonality, a representative of the diplomatic corps cannot avoid expressing the assessment and attitude of his or her state towards the described event. In this case, we are talking about expressivity in the diplomatic language.

Methodology

In order to analyze strategies for displaying expressivity in Arab diplomatic communication, we have set ourselves the task of looking at a collection of the most common syntactic strategies for displaying expression in the texts of speeches made by members of the Arab diplomatic corps.

The study was based on 60 public speeches by members of the diplomatic corps and politicians from Arab countries in various United Nations bodies. All the speeches were dedicated to the situation in the Middle East, which includes a diverse range of issues: the humanitarian situation in the region, assistance to victims of the war, discussion of resolutions on the Syrian crisis, etc. The time frame covers the period from 2011 to 2018, i. e. from the beginning of the Syrian crisis.

The UN was chosen because it is one of the largest platforms for diplomatic dialogue and is open to the general public. In addition, Arabic is one of the six official working languages of the UN, which can guarantee the originality of all texts in Arabic. According to General Assembly Resolution 3190, published in 1973, Arabic has become the official language of this organization and since then all documents have been “automatically” translated into Arabic.

The main method used is the principle of contrastive analysis, which allows the application of certain comparison parameters (the method of linguistic interpretation).

Discussion

The relatively modest number of researches is dedicated to the analysis of the phenomenon of expression in Arab public speech, especially compared to other areas related to the development of the modern Arabic language. According to E. N. Haigadachnaya, a researcher of expression in politicians' speeches, “Effective public speech is maximally deautomated, personally oriented, extremely expressive and emotional” [3, p. 7]. This understanding also applies to the speeches of politicians and diplomats, but it is worth noting that the institutionality of the environment and the peculiarities of the diplomatic substyle, which is typical for diplomats' speeches, noticeably limit the space for free emotional self-expression. Diplomatic speech is less emotional and expressive, but it also tries to achieve maximum impact on listeners, and speakers can also express their attitude towards the subject they are speaking about. In such cases we can observe the expressivity of text and speech.

Linguistic manipulation strategies have now been developed to such an extent that they can significantly influence the behavior of the masses [4, p. 84], the outcome of negotiations or voting, for example, in international organizations for a resolution. In order to achieve positive results, political and diplomatic representatives use different language techniques and practices of expression as a tactic of manipulation. Scientific research shows that in any act of speech communication, communicators pursue certain non-ver- balized goals, which ultimately affect the actions of the interlocutor [5].

Often, both in domestic situations and in scientific research, there is kind of diffusion of the concepts of “expression” and “expressivity”, so it seems necessary, firstly, to clarify the differences in the meaning of these definitions.

The concept of “linguistic expression” is not fully and uniformly defined in general theory [6, p. 8]. In dictionaries one can find the following definitions: «Expression is the expression of feelings, experiences, expressiveness» [7]; “expression is the expressiveness, bright, significant expression of feelings, moods, thoughts” [8]; “expression is what gives expressive power to something that makes that something expressive” [9].

According to the Linguistic Encyclopaedic Dictionary, edited by V. N. Yartseva, expressivity is “a set of semantic and stylistic features of a language unit that ensure its ability to serve in a communicative act as a mean of subjectively representation of the speaker's attitude to the content or receiver of the speech” [10].

In other words, expressivity is a semantic-stylistic category that represents the speaker's emotional and evaluative attitude, while expression is “an increased expressiveness of speech that consists of additional emotional and evaluative information” [11, p. 3]. The difference lies in the focus of the concept: expression is a linguistic characteristic of speech, while expressivity is a characteristic of the agent's attitude towards reality, which appears at different levels of language. In this paper, expressivity will be used to describe the relationship of a political or diplomatic figure to the issue under discussion, while expression will be used to describe the degree of evaluativity and emotionality of a speech.

However, there are researchers who look at this concepts' distinction differently. For example, the French linguist G. Guillaume in his work “Principles of Theoretical Linguistics” relates the concept of “expression” to expression and “expressiveness” to expressivity, with “expression” referring to an established aspect and expressiveness to improvisation [12, p. 87].

Russian researcher L. B. Morgoeva believes that expression is “an effect that produces a statement which contains information coming exclusively from a speaker. He or she passes judgment, inference or thought itself”. She sees expressivity as synonymous with expressiveness [13, p. 17] and defines the phenomenon as follows: “Expressivity is the ability or characteristic of any semantically organized unit of language or group of units to activate their potential capabilities (additional meanings) to achieve the best effect. And expression is the result of activating this capability” [13, p. 20]. Thus, expression, as understood by L. B. Morgoeva, refers to the way the recipient perceives information, while expressivity refers to the stylistic and semantic features of separate language units.

It is worth noting that expressivity is a characteristic of units at all levels of the language: at the phonetic level, for example, these are phonologically irrelevant changes in sounds, accent and intonation means. Morphological means include word formation and hypocoristic and pejorative affixes. Lexical expressive means cover layers of words that have an evaluative component in addition to their presentive-logical meaning, as well as interjections and emphatic particles. On the syntactic level, expressivity is signified in change of the usual word order, use of elliptical constructions, repetitions, etc. [10, p. 687]. In this paper we will elaborate on the lexical level of analysis of public speeches, but we will not neglect the other levels.

The specificity of Arab communication is the coexistence of two monogenetic but typologically unidentified communication systems: bookish-written literary system and spoken dialectal one [14, p. 74]. Since written and spoken styles mix in public speeches, it can be assumed that the two communication systems may also mix. Despite the official nature of the environment and the need to speak the language accepted in a given society, there is a shift away from the Modern Standard Arabic, which can also be an indicator of expressivity. Along with this, the alternation between the Modern Standard Arabic and Arabic dialects can manifest itself on both phonetic and lexical levels.

Expression of a word frequently is layered on its emotionally evaluative meaning, so it is often impossible to distinguish between the two concepts, which allows us to talk about emotionally expressive vocabulary.

The emotionally expressive colouring of a word is often influenced by its meaning, for example, words such as fascism (), repression) and wastefulness () received a sharply negative evaluation. In addition, different meanings of the same word may have different stylistic colouring: neutral: (the only people who make a profit on this forgotten land are traders), negative: (those who make money from wars: they speculate on food products and own dollars).

The development of expressive shades in the semantics of a word is also facilitated by its metaphorisation [15, p. 81]. It is possible that stylistically neutral words used in a figurative sense receive expression. The stylistic colouring of words is also greatly influenced by context.

The source of lexical units for creating expression can be scientific and technical terminology and special vocabulary [11, p. 7]. With figurative conceptualization (meta- phorisation, metonymisation, etc.), the general meaning of terms acquires an additional semantic load on a stylistic level. The expressivity of this type of terms does not become a permanent phenomenon; it is occasional.

Other sources for language expressiveness may be occasionally used foreign language vocabulary. Although the diplomatic style belongs to the officialese style, the analysis of the speakers' speeches shows accumulations of conversational expressions. The use of histor- isms and obsolete vocabulary is also possible. The effect of their usage is based on comparing elements of the past with the present. Their main expressive function is to give negative evaluative meaning, often irony and a grotesque shade founded in hyperbole [10, p. 11].

Means of expressivity's expression include the already mentioned metaphor (), which in political and diplomatic discourse is used as a ploy to attract listeners' attention [4, p. 85], metonymy, simile, allusions, quotations, catch phrases, proverbs and sayings.

It should be noted that in Arabic, expressivity is more based on speech techniques using words in their direct, non-transparent meanings: various repetitions of synonyms and quasi-synonyms, reduplication of lexical units [16, p. 21].

Metonymy (a literary device based on a certain association/similarity of two phenomena) is one way of pragmatic influence leading to a transformation of the world view existing in the consciousness of the receiver [4, p. 86]. In political discourse, however, metonymy acquires a long-term (sustainable) image and is understood as “replacing phrase with a virtually similar term or concept”. Metonymy (is one of the most used methods in contemporary Arabic speech [17, p. 115]. For example, the Arab press speaks of UN peacekeeping forces as “blue helmets”, »-- Egypt (literally: “land of the pharaohs”),-- Damascus (literally: “capital of the Umayyads") and others.

The metaphor in the Arabic language is less informatively loaded than in Russian. The motive for the metaphorical use of words is in most cases obvious, so this figure of speech does not have the same emotional impact on the recipient as in Russian language [16, p. 21].

Also, a class of metonymy, synecdoche, is widely used in Arabic discourse. The presence of expressive meaning often depends on the context. There are often “dead synecdoches” that have lost their emotional colouring, for example, -- gave a speech (literally: “threw a word”),-- Russia confirmed (literally: “Moscow confirmed”).

The simile is used to emphasise some peculiarities of the object in the phase by comparing it with other phenomena.

The epithet also serves as one of the brightest figures of speech. Moreover, epithets are used, the meaning of which already has an evaluation, as well as strengthening the evaluation of which is created by a number of techniques, for example, by introducing a different style, etc.

Successful communication is not possible without appealing to the background knowledge of the audience. In this case, allusion is used. It is a special method of text production, which consists in correlating the content of the statement's text with a precedent fact (historical or literary) by mentioning this fact or including it in the text [4, p. 85]. In speeches by politicians and diplomats, allusions are often linked to historical or recent events, which were widely covered in the press and caused public resonance.

Quotes and catch phrases, proverbs and sayings are also often used. In order to give expressivity, it is possible to include phrasemes that have a certain evaluation. They can be divided into positive, negative and modal, which, depending on the context, carry either a positive or a negative evaluation.

Positive evaluated phraseological units are characterized by stability and regularity of the usage, while negative evaluated phrasemes are more frequently changed in order to increase their expressiveness [11, p. 13].

O. E. Chukhantsev, a Russian orientalist and Arabist, stresses a great number of repetitions' usage to make Arabic communication more expressive. In his work on expressive-stylistic resources of the Arabic language, he highlights several types of repetitions.

• Rhymed repetitions, which are copulative/composite combinations of words formed from a single model which semantics are similar to those of a single word.

• Notional repetitions, which consist in the correlation of two or more synonymous units or units belonging to the same conceptual or associative field.

• Reduplications,i. e. repetitions of independent words in a structural and semantical state of conjugation [16, p. 17].

Syntactic parallelism is one of the means of expressivity. It can be an anaphoristic to reveal the general topic of a statement, returning the recipient to the early decoded speech segment [18, p. 12]. Public speeches are marked by an emphatic order of words: each sentence begins with new information called rheme [18, p. 13].

The language of diplomatic documents is characterized by the presence of the traditional practices and techniques of expression, which speeds up the process of forming typical style of phraseological units and determines the presence of a certain number of archaisms.

Types of diplomatic text may also include texts for briefings and press conferences for the media, even though they may be considered oral rather than written forms of communication. However, because texts for speeches are often prepared in advance, we can classify them as a special type of oral-written text.

In our study we have focused on such types of diplomatic documents of an oral-written nature, as a statement made by a representative of the diplomatic corps or a politician in front of an audience at UN platforms and recording of diplomatic negotiations.

Results

Expression of expressivity at syntactic level and at the level of Arab

diplomatic text