PECULIARITIES OF THE CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH-LANGUAGE DISCOURSE OF THE UN: PROBLEMATIZATION AND CATEGORIZATION

Abstract

Тhe article focuses on the main trends in the development of modern English-language discourse of the UN. The empirical evidence is taken from the speeches of delegates at the meetings of various UN bodies, as well as the documents of the organisation. The study allows us to apply M. Foucault's theory of problematisation to the issues central to the UN discourse – the current agenda of peace, security, socio-economic challenges and the well-being of society. The present study has revealed the widespread use of the image-conceptual scheme "villains-saviours-victims", which is used to build a hierarchy of relations between developed and developing states, as well as subjects that do not fi t into the system of rules and values of the "international community" within the discourse. The research has shown that such a structure of relations between participants in international organisations is also constructed by means of the friend-or-foe binary opposition. Most of the work is devoted to themost numerous category of "victims", i.e. the category of vulnerable/marginalised/disadvantaged groups. At the same time, within this category, communicators construct specifi c diff erences in terms of the priority of some risks over others for the allocation of aid - the so-called phenomena of "vulnerability hierarchy" and "risk priority" in accordance with the complexly diff erentiated conceptual and fi gurative scheme "risk group in risk situation in risk situation". The study contributes to further research in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics and facilitates teaching English as a foreign language, allowing to see the main trains of thought of contemporary members of the English-language community.