Violence through language in the Romanian totalitarian discourse (1945-1989)

• Main Author: Sorin Cristian Semeniuc
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Facultatea de Stiinte Politice, SNSPA 2011-10-01
• Series: Sfera Politicii
• Subjects: wooden language; clichés; evolution; effects; features
• Online Access: http://www.sferapoliticii.ro/sfera/164/art09-Semeniuc.php

Just as in any other totalitarian regime, the communist political discourse and the mass-media of that time employed to a great extent the strategy of the attack against the „enemy”, regardless of whether this enemy was domestic or foreign, real or imaginary. From a linguistic point of view, identifying, isolating and classifying the procedures used by the communists to this purpose means including these formulae into the typology of wooden language, whose features were accounted for by Françoise Thom. „The passage of attack”, a possible name for the ritual violent excerpt usually found in propagandistic speeches or articles, is mainly characterised by the fact that it is invariably present in these texts, it is shorter than the one devoted to „accomplishments” and contains linguistic prefabricates, repeated for years in a row, usually with no substantial change in form or meaning.