The manipulative potential of article models in German-language political and marketing discourse

The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the use of definite, indefinite and zero articles in the German language when constructing statements containing manipulative speech tactics. The scientific novelty of the work consists in a cognitively conditioned approach to the analysis of the manipulative potential of linguistic units of various partial and functional affiliation based on the material of modern types of discourse in the German language, namely, in describing the influence of the article meaning on the semantics and manipulative potential of the utterance. As a result, the author's empirical corpus was built and marked up. It contains 54 full-text occurrences obtained from German-language media of marketing and political orientation, on the basis of which 5 main models describing the manipulative potential for each of the three types of articles (15 units in total) were identified. Among the general trends characteristic of describing the manipulative potential of article meanings, one can single out the basis on the principles of similarity and connectivity of objects in a frame. The special meanings of articles are manifested in their morphological connectivity with demonstrative pronouns, the numeral “one” and the syntactic zero, respectively.