Public Expertise: Conflictogenic Potential of Cross-Party Parliamentary Communication

Abstract
The article deals with the issues related to the identification of public opinion about the conflict potential of cross-party communication in the Russia7n parliament. The relevance of the study is determined by the interest of modern scientists in the problems of political discourse; the issues of conflict and conflictogen from the standpoint of Legal Linguistics, Pragmalinguistics and Sociolinguistics. The purpose of this article is to conduct a public expert analysis to identify the conflictogenic nature of the Russian parliamentarians’ speech text fragments. The material of the study is the parliamentarians’ reporting speeches in a form of a monologue from the transcript of the State Duma final meeting in 2021. These politicians are the leaders and representatives of the Russian political parties: Yedinaya Rossiya, Spravedlivaya Rossiya – za pravdu, KPRF, LDPR. The results of the linguistic analysis and the poll with the participation of the younger generation representatives showed that in their speeches, the politicians actualize conflict-generating dominant behavior, reflecting political differences of the Russian parties. According to the degree of the conflictogenic potential manifestation, the following communication strategies are distinguished: insult, intimidation, accusation. The communicative strategy of insult is implemented through the tactics of blaming, discrediting and labeling. The tactics of intimidation strategy are exaggeration of consequences, formation of fear, warning of a threat, and reference to the past. The accusation strategy is updated with the help of the tactics of calling for justice, accusing dishonesty, reproaching for understatement and indignation at the current situation. Institutional parliamentary discourse, being a subgenre of political discourse, is implemented in conflictogenic communication strategies, the linguistic analysis of which leads to the conclusion that the use of these strategies is sanctioned by the institution itself to achieve institutional goals of praising their own merits and criticizing the actions of their opponents. The prospects of this study include further identification of markers of conflictogenic communicative behavior, since its actualization is a complex mechanism and depends on a number of sociocultural and pragmatic contexts that require further study.