Iconicity and Relevance in Russian Propaganda: Comparative Study of Media Texts for Domestic and Foreign Audiences

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UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

Graduate School for Humanities

MA Program in Linguistics of European Languages: English

Iconicity and Relevance in Russian Propaganda:

Comparative Study of Media Texts for Domestic

and Foreign Audiences.

Marharyta Voinalovych

student number: 10847928

rita_l@inbox.ru

Supervisors: O. Fischer

A. Peeters-Podgaevskaja

Amsterdam 2015

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In the age of Internet and television, information has become one of the most valuable resources, which can be used as a building material for different purposes – from developing countries and opening businesses to fighting ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ wars. Propaganda is one of these resources, which allows, among other things, totalitarian regimes to gain and maintain their power and pursue whatever aims they intend, whether or not their aims are fair or humane. The modern events concerning ISIS or other terrorist organizations have already shown how dangerous ideologies can be and to what actions they can lead the human minds.

The current crisis in Eastern Europe, which has polarised the map of the world once again by putting Western countries and the Russian Federation on different sides of the new ‘Cold War’, has shown how effective propaganda can prove itself: most of the population in Russia supports the actions of the government (Pew Research, 2015). It does not really matter whether these actions are eliminating independent media, annexing territories from other countries, sending troops to fight undeclared wars or threatening to launch nuclear weapons. Such a massive support is explained by many years of propagating and imposing values and opinions via the government-controlled television channels, news agencies, and more recently, Internet.

In 2005 Russian propaganda officially started to spread beyond the Russian speaking population, with the opening of the state-owned channel Russia Today (Nowadays, RT). While the official purpose of the channel is to ‘provide an alternative view’, Russia Today is actively promoting Russia’s current domestic and foreign policy around the globe in an attempt to justify the government’s actions or dismiss accusations spelled out by other countries.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the content and the form of the messages that Russian propaganda sends to its Russian audience, and also of the media texts created by the Russia Today сhannel, destined for audiences in the Western countries. The media texts are chosen with a very specific topic: Russia’s view of what happened to the Malaysian Boeing 777, flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014. The downing of MH17 marked the beginning of a real concern in Western societies, bringing the eastern European crisis to countries around the world, such as the Netherlands, Malaysia, Australia and the United Kingdom. Considering the resonance of the event and the importance of the guilty

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side being prosecuted, the Russian media texts concerning this topic might manifest a very wide range of persuasive methods.

The theoretical frameworks of the paper are Iconicity and Relevance Theory. Iconicity is employed to analyze how the form of the messages can convey the meaning; Relevance theory will allow to explore what kind of implications these forms have and how they contribute to the general messages of the discourse fragments.

This paper aims to explore the iconic means used in the Russian media text and to compare them to those of the English ones through the analysis of the explicit and implicit messages of both discourses. The main target is to discover how different the Russian rhetoric is for the Russian population and for the citizens of the Western countries. The research questions are: how does the communicator use iconicity in order to convey the intended message to the audience? What is the relation between moving image and language in propaganda discourse? What is the difference in the use of iconicity in propaganda messages intended for audiences with different backgrounds?

As the Russian propaganda started to be noticed in the Western countries quite recently, there is no extensive research data about how it operates on a linguistic and visual level. This makes the topic of the paper relevant for linguistics and communication studies. The paper may also contribute to clarifying the political tensions between the Russian citizens and the rest of the world, as the negative attitudes toward western civilization among Russians are formed and intensified with the help of propaganda.

This paper consists of a description of the theoretic frameworks (Section 2 and 3), methods (Section 4), analysis of the Russian (Section 5) and English (Section 6) multimodal media text and concluding remarks and suggestions about further research (Section 7).

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3 2. Iconicity

2.1. Semiotic accounts of language systems

2.1.1. Saussure’s notion of a language sign

Any language is a sign system, where every sign stands for something else than itself. According to Saussure (1983), a language system is built of signs that obtain meaning through internal relations within their own system and relations between the ‘signifiers’ and ‘signified’, where the ‘signified’ is the concept and the ‘signifier’ is its representation in a given semiotic system. In oral language, on which Saussure mostly concentrated his attention, the signifiers would be acoustic representations of language units (for instance, words) and the signified would be the mental concepts they represent. Thus, the word cat in English would be the signifier of the concept of a certain domestic animal that is different from ‘dog’, or ‘rabbit’, or ‘hamster’. Saussure insisted that the meaning of the signifier is conveyed through the relations with other signs in the system, where the meaning is constituted through the differences and oppositions that make a particular sign stand out among the unlimited amount of other concepts. For instance, blue gets its signification through the opposition to all other colors: ‘blue’ is not ‘red’, ‘black’, ‘white’, etc.

Saussure also pointed out the arbitrary nature of the relations between signifiers and signified on the morpheme level. According to him, the signifiers in language do not have intrinsic relations with their signifieds. The relation between them needs to be learned by the user of the language in order to be able to use the language system to communicate with other users. The arbitrariness of a language could, indeed, explain why the languages of the world are so different, and why the concept ‘cat’ has the signifier of chat in French, gatto in Spanish or кот /kot/ in Russian.

But if the signifieds in language were completely arbitrary and needed to be learned only though convention, it would be hard to find a plausible explanation, how and why languages emerged in the first place, as something must have motivated the form the linguistic signs acquired. Saussure himself claimed that the principle of arbitrariness in languages, “applied without restriction, would lead to utter chaos” (1983: 131), and pointed out the presence of intralinguistic motivation of signs in language, where the signs are determined by the system they are used in. He also acknowledged that signifiers may be motivated by their signifieds to some extent in cases of onomatopoeia, but he did not accept

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onomatopoeia as the evidence of extralinguistic motivation in the language sign system, as such cases are scarce compared to the whole amount of signs in the system.

It was Jakobson (1956) who addressed the problem of arbitrariness and challenged Saussure’s claim that in the language sign system the signifiers do not have intrinsic relations with their signifieds, by introducing iconicity as opposed to arbitrariness. Jakobson pointed out that iconicity is present not only on the phonological level (onomatopoeia, or sound symbolism), but also on the morphological and syntactic levels. Thus, the comparative and superlative degree forms of long – longer, longest – mimic, in relation to each other, the physical value of length via the amount of phonemes. Another well-cited example is the Latin

veni, vedi, veci, where the temporal succession of Ceaser’s actions is reflected in the same

succession of the syntactic structure: first he came, then he saw, and only after that he won. (Jakobson 1971 [1965]: 350).

2.1.2. Peirce’s icons, symbols and indexes

Another cornerstone in modern semiotics was laid by Peirce (1931-1958), who developed a classification of signs within three major groups: icons, indexes and symbols, which have a different degree of arbitrariness and motivation. The division of signs into these three groups also depends on the role of the constraints that the signified imposes on its signifier, which could be represented as qualitative, existential and conventional (Atkin, 2013). Below I will discuss each of them briefly.

Icons imply that signifiers bear a resemblance of a certain degree to their signifieds. The constraints require that the signifier reflect some of the qualitative features of the signified. It would be most explicit in the visual mode, where a picture or a video would be the icons of actual objects and events in reality. In oral language it might be a word, the acoustic characteristics of which resemble those of the signified; for example, boom, with the plosive consonant in the beginning, a long vowel and a sonorant nasal, mimes the nature of the sound they signify: a noise that has a sudden start, continues for a certain period of time and fades away.

Of course, icons cannot be absolutely non-arbitrary, as they require certain conventions in order for the users of the sign system to read them. In the case of boom, one needs to know the conventions of the language system. If it is a photographic image, the reader needs to learn what the photograph is in order to be able to understand that it stands for something in the first place. But icons are not absolutely motivated by the signified either, as

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even a video is not an absolute copy of a set of moments in reality – it is restricted only to the range of the camera shots seen from a certain perspective, and applies to only two human senses: sight and hearing.

In the group of indexes, the signifier and the signified are directly linked to each other. The constraint imposed here is the physical or existential connection between the two, where the former could be observed and the latter could be inferred. One of the most ‘favorite’ examples of an index is a foot print, which indicates its bearer. Another widely used example is that of the weather cock showing the direction of the wind. Quite often the indexes suggest the causality type of link between signifiers and signifieds, e.g. the smoke is an index of fire, as it is caused by fire. In language, in a very broad sense, any sign has indexical relations with the concept it signifies, as the signifier, for example dog, points to the concept of a ‘dog’. This type of meaning is called referential, as it is relatively independent from the context. In the narrower sense, indexes in the language may be represented as pronouns. In an utterance She went to that shop, signs she and that get their meaning only in the context of knowledge of who ‘she’ is and which ‘shop’ it is.

As to symbols, they are the most arbitrary, as they have been the most conventionalized: the link between the signifier and the signified cannot be constituted without prior learning of the connection, which is required for successful interpretation of the sign. As languages as sign systems are mostly arbitrary in their nature, one may suggest that all the language units are symbols to some extent. But even though, synchronically, the motivation is not present in symbolic signs, diachronically it is, since there is always something that has motivated their creation within the system.

The classification above leads one to assume that the arbitrariness/motivation difference is rather a matter of degree than presence/absence in the sign. It also shows that these three groups, being abstract categories, do not provide a strict taxonomy, which would account for all cases of signs strictly within its own category, a point which was touched upon by several authors. For example, John White (1999) supports the idea that there is no clear boundary between iconic signs and non-iconic indexes, and demonstrates how they can interact in one and the same sign of a foot print, which is both indexical (the print points to the presence of the bearer of the foot) and iconic (it reflects the qualities of the foot that has left it) in nature. A photograph, which is very iconic in relation to what it signifies, is also indexical, as it points to what is portrayed on the photo. As Cristian Metz pointed out, quoted

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by White, (1999: 84): ‘not everything is iconic in the icon, and there is the iconic outside the icon’.

Peirce, who had developed a very fine-grained taxonomy with sixty-six sign categories, which could be projected into more than 59 thousand types (D’Alleva, 2005: 31), agreed himself that icons, indexes and symbols are not more than ‘abstractions’ (Peirce 1931-1958, 2: 312); abstractions, which, nonetheless, are useful to be able to label certain patterns in language that are of interest to this paper.

2.2. Iconic images, diagrams and metaphors

While semioticians like Peirce and Saussure concentrated a great deal of their attention on the arbitrary symbols the iconicists are mostly concerned with the icons, the signs whose forms can be referential to its meaning. Peirce has also developed the further classification of iconic signs, or as he calls them, ‘hypo-icons’, into three classes: images, diagrams and metaphors.

Hypoicons may be roughly divided according to the mode of Firstness of which they partake. Those which partake of simple qualities, or First Firstness, are images; those which represent the relations mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors. (Peirce, 1931-58, 2: 277).

In other words, the images can refer to the concepts they signify through a ‘natural’ similarity, i.e. something that can be perceived with human senses, mostly by visual and aural perception (as far as languages are concerned); the diagrams are based on the similarity of the structures of the signs and concepts; the metaphor relays on semantic analogy, which results into mapping of one referent onto the other by means of attributing the same sign to both referents.

The relations between signifier and signified (also sign and referent) of the image, diagram and metaphor of signs were schematically demonstrated by Nänny & Fischer (2006: 462):

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Image Diagram Metaphor

sign mapping of signs sign x → sign x

↕ ↕ ≠ ≠

referent mapping of referents referent α ↔ referent β Figure 1. Relation of signs and referents in images, diagrams and metaphors (Nänny & Fischer, 2006). ↕ - iconic relation; ≠ - symbolic relation.

Figure 1 shows the principal difference between image and diagram, which are based on direct relations of similarity between the signs and the referents, on one hand, and the metaphor, which does not possess the direct link between the two, on the other. From a different perspective, where metaphoric and imagic iconicity are possible on the level of a single sign, diagrams require an arrangement of more than one sign. Nänny and Fischer (1999) also consider both metaphor and diagram a type of diagrammatic iconicity: semantic and structural. They motivate their distinction of diagrams and metaphors from images by absence/presence of one-to-one relations between the sign and the referent: while it is crucial in the image, it does not manifest itself in diagrams and metaphors, which are based on the relations within the signs and within the referents.

In order to understand how these abstract categories can be attributed to concrete signs, I will refer to how these three group of icons can manifest themselves in different modes.

2.2.1. Image

The most widespread manifestation of sound image in language is onomatopoeia, where the form of the sign “mimics” the sound of the referent. For instance, a bird name cuckoo imitates the sound this bird makes, splash imitates the sound of scattering fluid. Another type of verbal iconicity can be found in what is called synesthetic signs: certain vowels, consonants and suprasegments are intuitively perceived to represent visual or tactile properties of objects, such as size, brightness, softness and so on (Sadowski, 2001).

On the written language level, imagic iconicity is widely used in poetry and advertisement; thus the shape, colour, size of the letters can reflect some features of the

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concepts. It is worth mentioning poetic trends such as lettrism or futurism poems, which attracted some attention of the iconicists (e.g. White 2010, 2013)

As far as imagic iconicity is concerned, it is useful to turn to sign languages. As the nature of sign languages is visual, the signs tend to reflect the visual qualities of the concepts they denote often quite vividly. Hand gestures and body movements may in general be considered iconic to a certain extent; for instance, if a person is talking about a big object with his hands being wide apart. More often, however, they are indexical, as they denote concepts that do not resemble them. For example, raised eyebrows are an indexical sign of surprise, but they do not mimic the concept of ‘something the person did not expect’.

In the mode of still and moving image everything is iconic, naturally, as any image is an icon. What presents interest is that there are marked cases that are not fully conventionalized and hence stand out. For example, a picture of the cloud is just an indexical and iconic sign for the cloud itself, but if its shape reminds one of a dog, for instance, than it is an iconic representation of a dog.

2.2.2. Diagram

As the diagram implies reflecting the relations between different concepts, it cannot be represented on the level of a single sign. The favorite example, as it has been already mentioned, is veni, vedi, veci. Diagrammatic iconicity can also be observed in cases where two words, for example subject and predicate, are separated by a number of other words in between them, which suggests that the concepts they represent are very distant from each other. For example, in the sentence ‘In the evening he, though he always dreaded the

experience, went to see his aunt’, the inserted phrase, which creates a significant distance

between ‘he’ and ‘his aunt’, tends to reflect the social distance between them existing in reality.

One of the most vivid examples of diagrammatical iconicity can be found in symmetry. Norrman (1999) considered the symmetry found in the human body to be the source of love of symmetry in language. According to Norrman, symmetry allows to restore the wholeness in human vision and to create a sense of harmony; it can be achieved through repetition and inversion – something that can be observed very often not only in literary, but also in everyday language. Norrman explains the rhetorical figures of opposition, such as paradox, oxymoron, antithesis, ambiguity and irony as the product of the same longing for symmetry, as the opposites are halves of the same whole.

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In the visual mode rhetorical figures, such as opposition, paradox, oxymoron are also possible. Kennedy (1982) described how the rhetorical tropes can be represented in a static image by combining the depiction of different concepts in the same space. The study of Teng & Sun (2002) presented a very clear description of oxymoron and simile being expressed in the modality of the image in different advertisements.

2.2.3. Metaphor

Black (1977) defined metaphor as one concept understood in terms of another, for example, ‘love’ expressed in terms of a ‘rose’, in love is a rose, where certain features of ‘rose’, such as ‘beauty’ and ‘thorns’ are mapped onto the other concept to highlight its features. In iconicity, metaphor implies extending the conventional meaning of a sign.

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) devoted much attention to defining the role of metaphor in language and thinking, and they introduced the notion of ‘conceptual metaphor’. The most important and innovative point they make is that metaphor is not merely a poetic figure of speech, but rather an instrument of thinking. According to Lakoff (1993: 204), ‘the locus of the metaphor is thought, not language; metaphor is the major and indispensable part of our ordinary, conventional way of conceptualizing the world, and our everyday behavior reflects our metaphorical understanding of experience’. In other words, in order to constitute or grasp different concepts in reality, humans conceptualize them in terms of a previous experience via conceptual metaphor – projecting the semantic structure of something concrete and known onto the new, often abstract, concept. One of the most cited examples they provided is conceptualizing different kinds of lasting experiences (e.g. love, life, career), in terms of a

journey, where different abstract concepts are mapped onto concrete objects from the concept

domain of a journey. For instance, in a conceptual metaphor LOVE IS A JORNEY, the relationship is a vehicle, the difficulties are impediments on the way, life goals are destinations, etc. Numerous examples of conventionalized metaphors present in everyday language (we’ve stumbled upon our mutual differences; he’s without direction in his life; he’s

gone through a lot in life; they are at a dead-end) support this theory. On the basis of their

study, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) assumed that people use conceptual metaphor not merely for expressive, but also for understanding purposes.

In this sense, providing metaphorical connections between two concepts allows the communicators to help the audience to conceptualize new notions that are unknown to the latter in terms dictated by the former: as new concepts do not have any semantic structure, the

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metaphorical mapping imposes the structure of the existing concept onto the new one. Such an instrument would be very helpful in, for example, political discourse, when one wants to establish a certain attitude towards something. For example, U.S. President Barack Obama is quite often compared to a monkey in Russian social media, to create a negative impression of an uneducated and stupid personality within the communities that are unfamiliar with Obama’s political activity.

It is possible to use metaphors not only in language, but also in still or moving images, where instead of linguistic signs, visual signs are involved. For example, the metaphor with Obama is often expressed though political cartoons, where the U.S. President is sitting on a tree with a banana. The pictorial metaphor, which is often used in advertising and political discourse, is getting more attention from scholars nowadays (e.g., Forceville 1996, Maalej 2001), who attempt to explore it outside the language modality.

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11 3. Relevance Theory

3.1. Grice’s inferential model of communication

The classic theory of communication, based on Saussure’s and Peirce’s semiotics, relies on decoding signs. To challenge the classic code model of communication, Paul Grice (1989) developed an alternative view – the inference theory. The classic code model implies that the communicator encodes the intended message into a signal, which is decoded by the audience with the same code system. According to the inference theory, however, a communicator provides evidence of his/her intention to convey a message, which is inferred by the audience on the basis of this evidence (Sperber and Wilson, 1996). The inferential model suggests that not everything meant by the communicator needs to be encoded linguistically in order for the audience to grasp the meaning. Another of Grice’s claims was that “utterances automatically create expectations which guide the hearer toward the speaker’s meaning” (Wilson and Sperber, 2004: 607). For instance, consider this short dialogue:

A: Do you want a dessert? B: I’m full.

In this case, B does not encode the refusal into the linguistic signal ‘no’; the refusal is inferred by A nonetheless, due to the expectations of A to get the answer to the question asked. Of course, linguistic encoding and decoding is still present in any utterance; however, it is not enough for successful communication, where the audience receives the message intended by the communicator.

In his attempt to explain how the audience manages to infer what is meant by the communicator, Grice employed the Cooperative Principle of communication, which is described as follows: “Make your contribution such as it is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged” (Grice, 1975: 45). Grice’s Cooperative Principle is represented by what he calls four ‘Maxims of Cooperation’ – Quality (what is said by the communicator must be what he believes to be true), Quantity (where the communicator needs to provide as much information as required, not more), Relation (where the communicator needs to be relevant) and Manner (where the communicator needs to be as clear, brief and orderly as possible) – which are to be observed by communication participants (Grice 1989: 368-372).

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12 3.2. The Principles of Relevance

Sperber and Wilson (1996) also adopted the inferential model of communication, but they question the necessity of the Cooperative Principle and its four Maxims, arguing that, in fact, only one of the maxims needs to be observed – Relation, which is the basis for the Theory of Relevance. The question is, what does relevance mean in this framework?

According to Sperber and Wilson (1996), relevance can be characterized in terms of ‘positive cognitive effects’ and ‘contextual implications’. The audience, whether represented by an individual or collectively, always gets new information in a context.

A context is a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumptions about the world; it is these assumptions, of course, rather than the actual state of the world, that affect the interpretation of the utterance (Sperber and Wilson, 1996:

15).

The positive cognitive effect is a worthwhile change in these assumptions. The ‘contextual implications’ or ‘contextual effects’ are the most important types of positive cognitive effects; they imply a conclusion that can be inferred from input and context together, but from neither of them separately. Other positive cognitive effects may be strengthening, revision or dismissal of available assumptions. An input is relevant only when its processing yields a positive cognitive effect in a context of available assumptions (Wilson and Sperber, 2004).

Consider utterances (1) - (3) as examples of irrelevance in the present context (Sperber and Wilson, 1996: 119-120):

(1) 5 May 1881 was a sunny day in Kabul. (2) You are now reading.

(3) You are fast asleep.

Utterance (1) most likely does not interact with the assumptions you have in mind, therefore, no change in the assumptions takes place. As you are reading at the moment and you are already aware of it, (2) does not increase the strength of your assumption about the activity you are performing, nor does it change anything in the assumptions you have in

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mind, consequently no positive cognitive effect is achieved. Utterance (3), in its turn, is inconsistent with some of the assumptions you have in mind at the moment, for instance, that you have your eyes open and you are reading, therefore it is not relevant either. It leads to the conclusion that utterances (1) - (3) are most likely irrelevant, since they do not change in any way the assumptions you had in mind before reading them. However, their irrelevance makes them relevant in the context of someone who is reading this paper, as, in combination with prior assumptions about Relevance Theory, they construct conclusions about how the entire model works.

It is not only the contextual effects that account for the entire communication process, otherwise the audience would be processing every available piece of information that can interact with their available assumptions. Grice stated, and Relevance Theory agrees, that inference is an integral part of communication, and information is inferred on the basis of evidence, or ‘stimuli’, provided by the communicator to the audience to infer the message; in case of purely oral communication such stimuli would be utterances. It is in the communicator’s best interest to choose the stimuli that would convey the intended message in the best way possible. The ‘best way’ was defined by Wilson and Sperber (2004: 609) in terms of two interacting principles:

(i) Other things being equal, the greater the positive cognitive effects achieved by processing an input, the greater the relevance of the input to the individual at that time.

(ii)Other things being equal, the greater the processing effort expended, the lower the relevance of the input to the individual at that time.

(i) and (ii) allow one to assume that relevance is a matter of degree, and maximum relevance can be achieved when the largest cognitive effect is achieved with the least possible effort. Sperber and Wilson (1996: 260-266) call it the First, Cognitive, Principle of Relevance, which implies that human cognition tends to be geared to the maximization of relevance.

(i) and (ii) interact in both communicator and audience in what Relevance Theory calls ‘ostensive-inferential communication’ (Sperber & Wilson 1996:50-54). Ostensive-inferential communication is based on the assumption that the communicator realizes both the informative intention (to inform the audience of something) and the communicative intention (to inform the audience of one’s informative intention). Naturally, ostensive-inferential

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communication refers only to messages conveyed intentionally; if someone received information by overhearing something that was not meant for their ears, the communicative intention is not fulfilled. On the other hand, if someone at the bar puts an empty glass in the line of vision of a barman, he/she may not realize the intention of getting another drink, because, for example, the barman is constantly looking at the TV or is distracted by another customer. Though the informative intention is realized (the customer puts an empty glass on the counter to get a refill), the communication lacks the ‘ostensive stimuli’, e.g. a gesture or an utterance, which would attract the barman’s attention and inform him of the customer’s intention.

By producing ostensive stimuli, the communicator attracts the attention of the audience, which leads the latter to presume that the stimuli are worth processing, that they are relevant. This constitutes the basis for the Second Principle of Relevance - Communicative: every ostensive stimulus conveys a presumption of its own optimal relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1996: 266-278).

In ostensive-inferential communication, both the communicator and audience tend to observe the principles of relevance. The communicator wants to be understood by the audience, and thus tends to be optimally relevant by providing stimuli that would take the audience the least effort possible to receive the intended message. However, the communicator’s optimal relevance is always restricted by abilities and preferences. While the former is an unconscious restriction that can be controlled by neither communicator nor audience, the latter is a matter of willingness, which, in its turn, also conveys information. For instance, a wife vaguely hinting at her husband what she wants for her birthday is not optimally relevant in expressing her intention to obtain a certain piece of jewellery; however, her ostensive behavior is also conveying her message that she wants to be surprised. Whether she succeeds in passing on her intentions depends on whether she can match her expectations and inferring abilities of her husband: if she is too vague about what she wants, the stimuli of her intention would not be seen by the husband as ostensive, and he would not consider them relevant to process; if the wife is direct, the husband will process the stimuli without much effort, but the cognitive effect initially intended by the wife would be much less strong.

Another important point Sperber and Wilson (1996) made was that information can be relevant only to an individual. Despite the fact that we live in the same physical world, all prior experiences an individual obtains create his assumptions about the world, which constitute each individual’s ‘cognitive environment’. And while many assumptions can be

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shared in the cognitive environment of all people (‘I breath with my nose and mouth’) or a group of people (‘News on TV is true’), there are no identical cognitive environments; therefore, something that is relevant to one individual may be irrelevant to the other.

3.3. Explicatures and implicatures

The notion of ‘implicature’ was first introduced by Grice (1989). He opposed ‘what is

implicated’ to ‘what is said’ in the utterance. On the basis of implicature, Sperber and Wilson (1996) have introduced ‘explicature’, which is somewhat different from Grice’s ‘what is said’. According to them, explicature of the utterance is understood by the audience with the help of decoding and inference, whereas implicature can be reached only through inference. To explain how exactly the overall process of grasping explicatures and implicatures works, Wilson and Sperber (2004: 615) suggested the following scheme of subtasks the audience handles in comprehension:

(i) Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about explicit content (explicatures) via decoding, disambiguation, reference resolution, and other pragmatic enrichment processes.

(ii)Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual assumptions (implicated premises).

(iii) Constructing an appropriate hypothesis about the intended contextual implications (implicated conclusions).

The appropriateness of the hypothesis drawn is based on the expectations of communicator and audience to be relevant in communication, thus the audience will be constructing implicated premises and conclusions until this expectation of relevance is satisfied, e.g., until the communicator gets an answer to his/her question. Consider the following example (Wilson and Sperber, 2004: 39):

A: Do you want to go to the cinema? B: I’m tired.

The information that B is tired does not satisfy the A’s expectation to get an answer to whether B wants to go to the cinema. At this stage, A tries to draw inferences that would satisfy his/her expectation. The most likely assumption that A would draw would be that B being tired is a good reason not to go the cinema, which A would use as implicated premise

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to come to the conclusion that B does not want to go to the cinema. Schematically this comprehension process could be represented as follows:

1. B is tired (explicature)

2. B’s being tired is sufficient reason not to want to go to the cinema (implicated premises)

3. B does not want to go to the cinema because B is tired (implicated conclusion)

The explicature is understood not only via decoding, but also though pragmatic enrichment processes, where ‘I’ is understood as ‘B’ through the reference assignment. Constructing implicated premises allows A to draw an implicated conclusion that satisfies his/her expectation of relevance; thus the audience receives the implicature intended by the communicator.

However, quite often the communication does not go as smoothly as that, misunderstanding and miscommunications are very frequent phenomena. These might happen for different reasons. For example, the communicator entertains wrong assumptions about the audience’s expectation or about the audience’s inferring abilities. Another problem of miscommunication can be weak communication, which is based on weak implicatures.

According to Wilson and Sperber (2004: 620),

…a proposition is strongly implicated (strong implicature) if its recovery is essential in order to arrive at an interpretation that satisfies the addressee’s expectations of relevance. It is weakly implicated if its recovery helps with the construction of such an interpretation, but is not itself essential because the utterance suggests a range of similar possible implicatures, any one of which would do.

Sperber and Wilson (1996: 217-243) mostly referred to weak implicatures as ‘poetic effects’, where figurative speech is concerned, as for instance, in metaphoric propositions. Consider the utterance John has a square mind; it contains many weak implicatures, such as John is a man of principle, he does not change his mind easily, he is rigid in his thinking, and so on, that allow us to draw the conclusions of what is meant by the utterance. The weak implicatures, of course, can also be spelled out and become explicatures; however, in that case the expressive ‘poetic effects’ would be lost.

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Naturally, there is never a guarantee that the message the audience receives is the message the communicator intended; nevertheless, the stronger the implicature, the greater is the chance that the audience draws the implicated conclusions meant by the communicator. Or, vice versa, weak implicatures may bring the audience to conclusions not expected by the communicator at all. This brings us to another point – the responsibility for drawing conclusions. Explicit and strongly implicated information makes the communicator’s intention rather evident, hence the responsibility for the inferred message lays mostly with the communicator. Weak implicatures leave the audience quite some space for speculation, depending on their cognitive environment and abilities. Imagine these two utterances, said by A to B before B runs out of the building.

1) A: It seems to me I smell smoke. 2) A: Fire!

While in 1) A might be weakly implicating that the building is on fire, B is responsible for drawing the conclusion they need to evacuate from the building. In 2) A explicitly warns about the fire and strongly implicates the danger of staying inside, thus the responsibility of the conclusion drawn by B lies with A.

Particularly interesting is the use of weak implicatures to manipulate the audience, given that the communicator can assess their cognitive environment correctly. Imagine that B has a very strong fire phobia, in that case even 1) would be a strong implicature for B to leave the building and to take the responsibility for drawing the conclusion. While A cannot be held responsible for this conclusion formally, the knowledge of B’s cognitive environment allows A to construct weak implicatures in the utterance that would be optimally relevant only to B, manipulating the latter to infer the conclusion intended by the A.

3.4. Application outside verbal communication

Wilson and Sperber developed their Relevance Theory mostly around verbal communication between individuals. Later, rather successful attempts were made to apply their theory in other modalities. Forceville (2005) explored the applications of explicatures and strong and weak implicatures in static images accompanied with text – in Peter van Straaten’s calendar cartoons. Forceville demonstrated how defining the time, place and genre of communication can provide the communicator with the right assumptions of the audience’s expectations of

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relevance. The paper is of interest not only as an attempt to analyze multimodal discourse within the framework of Relevance Theory but also because it appeals to mass communication – something that Sperber and Wilson did not pay much attention to. Forceville pointed out some of the aspects that would need special attention in multimodal mass-communication compared to individual-to-individual models explored by Relevance Theory so far.

First of all, mass communication appeals to more than one individual, which creates a challenge for the communicator to be relevant to all of the audience, or at least, to most of it. It creates a notion of ‘collective cognitive environment’, which is built on the assumptions shared by the members of the audience. Secondly, the communicator and audience are not present in the same time and space frame, which creates additional difficulties for the communicator to assess the assumptions present in the audience’s cognitive environment. Thirdly, the visual mode suggests many more ways to communicate the message than just the language mode.

In the case of the documentary and news video discourse that will be discussed in this paper, the communicator already has some assumptions about the audience as there are a lot of common things that unite their target audience: they speak the same language, they watch the programs with the expectation to get informed about certain events, about which they already have assumptions due to previous video news, etc. The multimodality allows the communicator to provide more implicit evidence – through iconicity in language, moving image and sound – for the audience to infer the message the communicator intends for them.

The problematic aspect that arises, though, is the communicator and the genre. Assuming that the discourse under discussion has propagandistic implications, it creates two groups of people with different expectations about it: the individuals who define the genre as ‘news programs’ have assumptions that they will receive truthful information, which would meet their expectation of relevance; the individuals that see the genre as ‘propaganda’ will infer imposition of certain points of view, which is relevant according to their expectations. The problem of the communicator is based on the question who communicates the information and the intention: presenter, chief editor, institution, political regime or another party. These issues, however, are not the focus of the present paper; nevertheless, their further research could shed more light on how Relevance Theory can be employed in ideological discourse.

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19 4. Methods and data description

The research methods include qualitative analysis, elements of quantitative analysis and comparative analysis.

Qualitative analysis consists of identifying, describing and grouping different iconic means, employed in the extracts of a propaganda video discourse in Russian and English, related to the events of MH17 airplane crash. The Russian video discourse extract under consideration is a 20-minute documentary, published by the Russian TV channel Rossiya 24 on August 6, 2014 under the name Boeing 777 2.0. Разоблачение провокации с Боингом ‘Debunking of the Provocation with the Boeing’. The documentary mainly consists of the author’s narrative, fragments of interviews, footage and graphic representation of the crash site. The language of the documentary is Russian with fragments in Ukrainian, which are either voiced-over or accompanied with subtitles in Russian. The full transcript of the documentary is presented in Appendix A with an English translation. The transcript is divided into 45 extracts, each presented with the indicated time frame, with the principle of the division being one speaker per extract.

The English extracts are a Russia Today documentary named MH17: The Untold

Story, published on 22 October, 2014, and a fragment of the news program In The Now,

called Plane Truth (S2E6), published on September 9, 2014. MH17: The Untold Story consists of different fragments, containing author’s narrative, interviews, footage of the crash site and other locations. The Plane Truth mostly consists of the presenter’s narrative and comments of two experts in the form of a dialogue with the presenter. The transcripts of MH

17: The Untold Story and In The Now: Plane Truth can be found in Appendixes B and C

respectively. The transcripts are divided into extracts, which contain either one speaker or one interview per extract.

The qualitative analysis will unveil the most widely used iconic means in the language and moving image mode, and their combination and interaction. Further qualitative analysis lies in applying iconic means to identify intended explicit and implied messages in the Relevance Theory framework. The quantitative analysis is based on identifying the frequency of occurrence of those iconic means that can be objectively quantified, such as specific words or expressions in the language mode, or identical images in the visual mode.

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The comparative analysis suggests examining two English language video extract for the employment of iconic means and comparison to iconicity manifestations used in the

Boeing 777 2.0 documentary in language and moving image mode. Explicit and implied

messages of the Russia Today videos in Relevance Theory framework are compared to those of the Boeing 777 2.0 documentary.

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21 5. Analysis of the Russian video extract

5.1. Language

5.1.1. Lexical choices

The choice of synonyms, especially those with a strong connotation, which are often accompanied by degree adverbs, can be considered rather iconic in the sense that they allow a concept to obtain features. These would be absent in case a neutral word is employed, which could be compared to metaphoric projection of negative features of the separate words onto the ideas expressed, or conceptual framing.

To start with, the documentary contains numerous lexical items with strong expressive meaning. Consider the choice of adjectives in examples (1) and (2):

(1) ...это откровенная ложь. (extract 1.3)1 ‘…it is a blatant lie’

(2) … что причину трагедии стоит искать в крайне плачевном состоянии

украинской армии. (extract 1.32)

‘… that the cause of the tragedy should be sought in the extremely deplorable state of the Ukrainian army’.

(3) …они будут пролетать над зоной, где последние несколько дней велись

ожесточенные бои. (extract 1.20)

‘… they are going to fly over the zone, where fierce fighting was taking place.’

The use of these adjectives allows the concepts of ‘a lie’ and ‘bad state’, ‘fighting’ which are already negative in their denotation, to be intensified, i.e., to become even more negative. Adjectives with positive connotations are also used, mostly referring to the ‘expertise’ area of the specialists, used in the documentary.

(4) …тщательное изучение… (extract 1.3)

‘…thorough study…’

(5) …один из самых авторитетных специалистов... (extract 1.11)

‘one of the most reputable specialists… (6) ... досконально изучили… (extract 1.11)

‘…thoroughly examined…’

1

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In (4) and (5) the adjectives and adverbs intensify the concept of scientific study, that is associated with effort, precision and objectivity, with ‘thoroughness’. Diagrammatic iconicity can also be observed in (2) and (5), where the higher number of intensifiers (two instead of one) reflects the higher intensity.

The documentary also employs nouns and verbs with expressive connotation.

(7) Этот ролик, с подачи Службы безопасности, разгоняется всеми украинскими СМИ (extract 1.1.)

‘This video, tipped off by the Security Service, is dispersed by all the Ukrainian media’

(8) ...господин фейсбучный министр Аваков. (extract 1.4.)

‘mister Facebook minister Avakov’

(9) Однако, как шеф Cлужбы безопасности должен был знать... (extract 1.9.) ‘However, as a patron of the Security Service should have known’

In example (7), с подачи ‘from the tip of’, ‘tipped off by’ and разгоняется ‘is dispersed’, which already are expressive as metaphors, possess negative connotation through their usage in different contexts. Thus, the primary meaning of подача is ‘alms’, and разгонять is primarily used in the sense of ‘forcing objects or people to disperse’.

In (8) and (9) one may observe how government officials can be given a negative connotation. The Russian word шеф ‘patron’, ‘boss’ is not used to refer to a head of a government department in neutral discourse, but it is often used to refer to a ‘boss at work’ and, sometimes, ‘mafia boss’. In example (8), the adjective фейсбучный (derived from English ‘Facebook’), is even more negative, as it strongly highlights the habit of the minister to post on a social network as opposed to doing actual work in the government.

Referring back to the ‘expertise’ semantic field, the word эксперты ‘experts’ is pronounced in the 20-minute documentary eleven times, only three being the reference to the international experts in the future investigation, and eight being used as the source of information provided, for instance (10) and (11). Another word специалисты ‘specialists’ occurs eight times, out of which three are mentioned in the context of the source of information, for instance (12).

(10) По словам экспертов, там сейчас стоит 56 полк. (extract 1.5) ‘According to the experts, now the 56th regiment is located there.’

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(11) Но эксперты уверяют: целью украинской армии мог стать российский самолет (extract 1.26)

‘But experts assure: the aim of the Ukrainian army could have been a Russian plane.’ (12) По словам специалистов, в таком виде пусковые установки могут

перевозиться только после выстрелов (extract 1.5)

‘Ассоrding to the specialists, the missile launchers can be transported in such a state only after shootings.’

Such a frequent appeal to ‘expertise’ creates the idea of an objective and impartial professional opinion being projected onto the key points, expressed in the documentary, which is also supported by precision, conveyed through a large number of figures employed. Thus, figures denoting distance, size, time, weight, exact number or percentage of possibilities occur in five fragments of author’s voice-over and in seven fragments of the experts’ comments: 24 times in total (see (13) for an example). Another form of precision, names of different vehicles or high-tech objects, occurs in five fragments ten times, for example (14).

(13) ...записан ...в 16:33 ‘recorded… at 16:33’ (extract 1.14);

дальность действия – до 35 км ‘action range is up to 35 km’ (extract1.15) (14) МиГ-27 ‘plane MiG-27’ (extract 1.37);

спутник СПРН ‘satellite SPRN’ (extract 1.41)

The expertise of the commentators is also fortified by the manner they are presented – most of the experts have more than 5 words in the name of their title, as it appears on the screen. For instance, in (15) one can see with what title the speaker Stanislav Fyodorov was presented on the screen during his comments.

(15) Станислав Федоров, первый заместитель главного конструктора НИИ приборостроения им. В.В. Тихомира (extract 1.16)

‘Stanislav Fyodorov, the first deputy of the chief design engineer of V.V. Tikhomir Research Institute of Instrument Engineering’

Another speaker, Vladimir Mikhailov, whose title on the screen seem to be quite short, is orally presented by the author as ‘the ex-Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Air Forces, the retired Army General Vladimir Mikhailov’ (extract 1.29). Such a presentation of experts also

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manifests diagrammatic iconicity: the more words in the title, the more experience and respect the person has, therefore the more trustworthy he is.

Special attention should be also paid to several lexical items that are widely used in Russian propaganda outside the discourse fragment under consideration. In the documentary

Boeing 777 2.0 the author refers to the militants in Eastern Ukraine exceptionally as

ополчение ‘self-defence’, ‘militia’ or ополченцы ‘militia men’, ‘self-defense representatives’, and never as ‘separatists’, ‘militants’ or ‘rebels’, or any other word which may bring up negative analogies. In the Russian language, ополчение ‘militia’ refers to a group of civilians, who form a military unit only in war times, and cease functioning once the war is over.

In extract 1.4, the speaker refers to the Ukrainian authorities as каратели ‘punitive expeditioners’ or ‘insurgency punishers’ и хунта ‘junta’, ‘a military regime’, which clearly have very negative meaning. Kаратели ‘insurgency punishers’ is mostly associated with World War II times, as this name often referred to the Nazi SS squads, whose purpose was described as elimination of the insurgent population in the Soviet Union. Хунта ‘junta’ was hardly employed in the mass media, except for the past two years. It is worth mentioning that the Russian nouns ополчение ‘militia’, каратели ‘punitive expeditioners’ and хунта ‘junta’ are used mostly in Russian rhetoric about Ukraine since the events in February 2014.

Figure 2. Dynamics of the popularity of search requests хунта ‘junta’, ополчение ‘militia’, каратели ‘insurgency punishers’ over the years 2004-2015, provided by Google Trends.

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Figure 2 demonstrates that these words became popular in the Russian segment of the Internet in the first half of 2014, after the events in Ukraine which led to Presidential and Parliamentary re-elections.

5.1.2. Metaphors and metonyms

The documentary contains numerous metaphorical expressions, most of which are more or less conventionalized in the Russian language. I will pay attention only to several examples, where creative or strongly expressive metaphors are used:

(16) Официальный Киев со скоростью принтера выдает одно за другим заявления (extract 1.1)

‘Official Kiev is issuing statements one after another with printer speed’

(17) …маркеры, которые говорят о том, что клеили этот диалог из разных

эпизодов (extract 1.13)

‘…markers, which tell us that this dialogue was glued together from different episodes’

Examples (16) and (17) demonstrate how rather abstract and complicated processes can be visualized through metaphoric mapping of concrete actions (like printing documents one after another or gluing two pieces together). The visualization used here prompts an amateur being the agent of the action, and introduces its negative associations, such as carelessness and unprofessionalism.

The metonymy used in (16) – официальный Киев ‘official Kiev’ – presents an interesting case for analysis. The Ukrainian government is referred to metonymically as Киев ‘Kiev’ nine times, as Украина ‘Ukraine’ – twice and as украинское правительство ‘Ukrainian government’ – once. When the concept of the institution of the Russian government is in the text, it is not referred to metonymically; moreover, it is employed in impersonal sentences, leaving the agent unidentified. Such Russian constructions are similar to the English use of ‘they’ as unidentified pronoun, only in Russian the pronoun is omitted completely.

(18) Закономерный вопрос украинскому правительству озвучивают в российском министерстве обороны. (extract 1.24)

‘A logical question to the Ukrainian government is verbalized at the Russian Ministry of Defense.’

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(19) В Российском министерстве Обороны уже призвали ответить на вопросы касательно того, как и где в этот день применялась авиация украинской армии. (extract 1.39)

‘At the Russian Ministry of Defense [they] have already appealed to answer the questions concerning how and where the aviation of the Ukrainian army was employed that day.’

Considering the frequent occurrence of the ‘Kiev’ metonymy and its opposition to (18) and (19), one may assume that it calls up an image where the authorities are represented by a single entity, or a single person, in contrast to impersonal authorities in (18) and (19).

5.1.3. Translation manipulations

The documentary contains several fragments from the Ukrainian television in the Ukrainian language, which are translated into Russian either in the form of subtitles or by means of a voice-over. Despite the fact that Russian and Ukrainian are closely related languages with a large shared vocabulary (with some phonological differences), it is quite a usual practice to bring in grammatical modifications or omit some words of little importance for the convenience of reading the subtitles or fitting them into the time frame. However, some changes that the translated text went through deserve attention, as they can be considered quite iconic. Consider example (20a) and (20b) from extract 1.6:

(20) a) Ukrainian: Техніка готова для виконання завдань в любих умовах, і за наказом нашого керівництва готові приступити до виконання любих завдань. ‘The equipment is ready for executing tasks in any conditions, and, on the order of our сommand, is ready to proceed to execute any tasks’.

b) Russian subtitles: Техника готова для использования в любых условиях, и по приказу нашего министра, готова приступить к выполнению военных задач. ‘The equipment is ready for use in any conditions, and, on the order of our minister, is ready to proceed to execute military tasks’.

The interesting substitutions here are Ukrainian наше керівництво ‘command’, ‘superiors’ being replaced by Russian наш министр ‘our minister’, especially in the light of the metonymy in the example (16), which replaces the concept of impersonal institution by a single person entity; and, clearly, the replacement of ‘any’ by ‘military’ also does not seem to be coincidental, as it intensifies the concept of the militarism being present in this extract.

Another language transition case worth mentioning is example (21):

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(21) Заявление сделал сам глава Cлужбы ‘безпеки’, Валентин Наливайченко (extract 1.7)

‘The statement was made by the head of the ‘pezpeka’ service himself, Valentin Nalivaychenko’

In (21) безпека (bezpeka) is a Ukrainian word denoting ‘security’. In the Russian language there is a word with a very similar sound form, беспечность (bespečnost’), which means ‘carelessness’. The use of the Ukrainian word, which sounds like something completely different and, even, opposite in Russian, is, clearly, an intentional attempt to bring a negative connotation to the concept which is usually associated with a positive meaning.

5.1.4. Syntax

Diagrammatic iconicity is manifested most on the level of the sentence structures through repetitions, the place of words in a sentence, linking, word order, etc., which are present to some extent in every extract of the documentary. I will discuss only a number of cases that seem to stand out from the conventional use of sentence structures and may convey an important meaning.

One of the most conspicuous iconic means is repetition, which is another manifestation of symmetry. It is always present in a cohesive text, in order to link the sentences into an integral linguistic unit; however, when some things are repeated too often, their purpose goes beyond mere functional cohesion. It was discussed previously, in examples (10)-(12), how repetition of ‘specialist’ and ‘expert’ creates the idea of professionalism and impartiality. The documentary also conveys the supporting idea of ‘objectivity’ and ‘precision’, by constantly repeating phrases from this semantic field. Thus, the phrase объективный контроль ‘objective control’ was repeated four times, свидетельство ‘evidence’ or свидетельствовать ‘to testify’ – four times, именно or как раз ‘exactly’ – nine times.

Diagrammatic iconicity often presents itself through inserting words between subject and predicate.

(22) … СБУ заявило, что задержало двух граждан России на границе в Донецкой

области, которые, якобы, обслуживали Буки.

‘…the Security Service of Ukraine stated that they arrested two citizens of Russia on the border of Donetsk region, who, as though, serviced the Buks’

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Якобы ‘as though’, which means to show the falsity of a statement or a concept, diagrammatically creates the distance between the subject ‘which’ and the verb ‘service’, which is mapped onto the connection between the subject and the predicate. In other words, diagrammatic distancing form a weakened link between the ‘two citizens of Russia’ and ‘served the Buks’.

Iconicity also manifests itself in interrogative sentences and negation. Thus, extracts 1.25 and 1.40 consist of five questions that are put to Ukraine by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Three of the questions are formulated as general yes/no, question and two others start with ‘why’ or ‘for what’? Such a formulation, where no specifics are asked, especially accompanied by the comments that the responder “is silent” (extracts 1.26 and 1.41), shows these questions to be rhetorical ones, i.e. questions that do not require an answer and serve to make a point. One may observe here diagrammatic iconicity in the terms of irony – saying one thing while meaning the opposite, which is symmetry in reverse. A rhetorical question, while pretending to be a question, means the opposite – a statement.

As to negations, it is worth mentioning that the documentary frequently appeals to negation mechanisms for intensifying denial and the negation itself, as Russian grammar allows using negative particles more than once in one sentence if applied to different parts of the sentence. Though the formation of such negations can be considered normal in neutral speech, the excessive use of sentences with two or more negative particles stands out quite vividly in the documentary. Consider the following examples:

(23) Всего этого у ополченцев нет и никогда не было. (extract 1.15) ‘The militia men do not have any of this and have never had [not]’.

(24) Украинские зенитчики за последние десятилетие ни разу не проводили боевых стрельб на полигоне (extract 1.33)

‘In the past decade Ukrainian missile launchers have not had [no] a single weapons training exercise in the field’.

In (23) negation particle не ‘not’ is intensified by particle ни ‘no’, ‘none’. (24) seems to be an even more convincing denial through triple negation: нет /net/ ‘do not have’, никогда ‘never’, не ‘not’. Diagrammatically, the more negative particles in the sentence, the stronger is the negation, or denial.

Separate attention should be paid to the linking of sentences in the text and the connectors, as the connection between the sentences reflects the connections between the