Formal Analysis of Political Discourse

Abstract

As part of the study, a correlation diachronic analysis of the discursive structure of the political process in Ukraine was undertaken. The sources of the study were the texts of the Messages of the President of Ukraine to the Verkhovna Rada for 2009-2020. The indicators were calculated using the programming environment R, using the open analytical packages, based on the developed algorithm. There were given the basic provisions concerning the analyzed corpus of texts as ones which can be considered representative considering the purposes of the research. The level of correlation was fixed, which varied in some cases from 0.45 to 0.82 with the application of the described preparatory stage. The required minimum level of 0.4 was determined as that correlation indicator which can be considered as a significant one.

The key discursive patterns (DP) were determined in a set of concepts and categories that were used to describe individual topics within the texts. There was constructed the table of key elements of each discursive pattern considering their statistical-probabilistic use in the analyzed corpus. The table of hierarchical usability of DP through the diachronic analysis of use in texts was constructed. It was determined that for the majority of the analyzed array there was a coincidence at the first level of the DP (excepting the text of 2013). It was indicated that the formal results of the study can be considered as a proof of the thesis of the subjectlessness of the political process, which was in fact a self-actualization of discourse. There was described the further development of automatic formal discourse analysis, which meant the clarifying and decomposing the elements of the DP through separate texts of the body with the definition of coincidences and differences in the semantic content of elements and building a peer-to-peer network model of synchronous discursive structure for each stage.