VARIABLES AFFECTING TELEOLOGICAL REFLECTIVE SENSE FORMATION IN ENGLISH POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Abstract
Why is it so that people using the same language, identical words, phrases, sentences with reference to the same conceptual entity do not understand each other, and cannot agree on seemingly the same idea? It looks like the spectre of the archetypal Tower of Babel looms over any issue associated with political discourse today. It is not only the problem of merely linguistic confusion. The quandary of the mismatch between the ‘speaker’s meaning’ and the ‘recovered meaning’ may acquire menacing proportions especially in situations when politicians have to grapple with existential threats like social stand-offs, international crises, military conflicts, etc. No wonder then that the problem of understanding, interpretation and evaluation is of vital importance for further advances in the artificial intelligence domain. Realising this, the developers are struggling to equip AI with ‘teleological threads’, with human- like ‘world knowledge’, and with the awareness of the final goal (‘Telos’). This enquiry is focused on the ‘ultimate explanation’ of meaning of an utterance in political discourse relying on the terminological apparatus and methodology of teleological semantics. A qualitative research design and some elements of correlation methods to assess the relationships between and among variables were used in this research. The factors which may affect, transform, or pervert the meaning of an utterance are posited in this account as qualitative variables.The initial assumption of this study is that the concept of the common «GOOD» as the final goal («Telos») and the intended purpose of any social and political activity functions as the catalyst of teleological reflective sense attribution. «Telos» determines the semantic relationship among variables and is viewed as a dependent outcome variable and as a consequent whose semantic content is affected by independent variables functioning as antecedents. The aim of this enquiry is to identify a set of variables potentially involved in teleological reflective sense formation, to determine their types, semantically relevant characteristics and semantic correlation patterns between independent and dependent variables. The empirical material used in this research is a corpus of topically related comments as linguistic representations of teleological reflection on current political issues highlighted in the British press. The nomenclature of variables involved in teleological reflective sense attribution in political discourse is determined by the selective nature of human perception, and by the principles of causality, purposefulness, and intended consequences.The formalised propositional model is suggested using sentential logic conditional formula for the analysis of the semantically relevant correlation among intervening, moderator, predictor, proxy variables. The variables concerned highlight the cause and effect relationship between the dependent variable «Telos» and the independent variables. A group of autochthonous variables reflecting individual dispositions of speakers in political discourse has been identified. They are preferences, attitudes, obsessions, biases.
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