Address forms and gender in political discourse (the case of Greek, Kazakh, Russian)

Abstract

The dominant ideologies of a society including those related to gender are put into practice via particular use of language. This paper presents findings from contrastive research that views address forms as a subcategory of linguistic gender involved in social gender construction in Kazakh, Rus­sian, and Greek political discourse: it discusses commonalities and differences from the viewpoint of Critical Discourse Analysis, which detects the social character of linguistic preferences and their role in existent power relations in the society. As the results illustrate, along with the speak­ers’ gender, there are other factors (the interviewee’s status, political affiliations of the newspaper, cultural norms) that shape the choice of address forms, communicative strategies of the speakers and type of interview (cooperation or contestation). Unequal distribution of power in the societies is evident not only in women’s numerical representation in socially and politically significant posi­tions but also in covertly gendered political discourse, with mass media representatives resorting to adversarial strategies of interviewing, and female politicians seem to be held responsible for all the flaws of their political institutions and are obliged to defend their right to be in power.