The Linguistic and Rhetorical Legacy of the Prague Spring: Reading the Czechoslovak Communist Party Daily, Rudé právo, from the Late 1980s

This study uses a corpus-informed lexicological approach to analyse texts published in the Czechoslovak Communist Party daily Rudé právo during the final years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The analysis aims to uncover how far such texts represented a departure from or a reaffirmation of the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCentral Europe (Leeds, England) Vol. 14; no. 1; pp. 26 - 48
Main Author Dickins, Tom
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Routledge 01.05.2016
Subjects
Czechoslovak Communism
ideological language
Miloš Jakeš
Normalization
political rhetoric
Poučení
Prague Spring
Rudé právo
Václav Havel
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Summary:This study uses a corpus-informed lexicological approach to analyse texts published in the Czechoslovak Communist Party daily Rudé právo during the final years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia. The analysis aims to uncover how far such texts represented a departure from or a reaffirmation of the norms of the pre-Gorbachev era and, in particular, the role that they played in the Party's attempt to control interpretations of the 1968 Prague Spring. The investigation also considers ways in which the texts sought to construct a 'new' reality in the light of the changes in the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries. The article maintains that the 'authoritative discourse' model represents an especially useful analytical framework for evaluating the impact of ideological language in the context of the Communist system. The model both helps to explain the relative acquiescence of most of the population, and also to track the extent to which the 'coded' message of the approved discourse was successful in slowing the demise of the regime.
ISSN:1479-0963
1745-8218
DOI:10.1080/14790963.2016.1235881