Reductionism as a Communicative Technique of Persuasiveness in Political Discourse (Based on the Talk Show “60 Minutes”)

The article characterizes reductionism as a communicative technique, which implements a communicative persuasion strategy in political discourse, viewed as a key goal of political interaction aimed at forming a certain public opinion. Based on the material of the Russian television political talk show “60 Minutes” issued in 2019–2024, the following types of reductionism: the semantic, stylistic, grammatical, and logical ones are described. It is revealed that this technique is explicated at different linguistic levels. In particular, at the lexical level the contents of utterance is simplified by means of generalizing metaphors and vocabulary with a broad meaning, the use of colloquial and slang vocabulary to create the effect of closeness to the audience. The implementation of grammatical reductionism is facilitated by the use of impersonal and passive constructions, which, by excluding the verbal actant, disclaim responsibility of specific referents. Logical simplification is achieved through selective citation, the construction of the opposition “own – alien”, appealing to statistical data and creation of vivid, but schematically simplified allegorical illustrations. The study showed that reducing the information, which is essential for understanding concepts, theories and their explanations, the actor inevitably models a unified socio-political situation in the utterance and proposes a vector for its comprehension by the audience.