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2021 - Volume 4 - Number 1

“President-Protector”: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of a News Report Promoting the Personality Cult of the President of Turkmenistan G. Berdymukhamedov

Sofiya Sarkisova * sofya.sarkisova2@gmail.com * ORCID: 0000-0001-9174-8417
University of Guanajuato, Division of Social Sciences and Humanities, MEXICO

Open Journal for Studies in Arts, 2021, 4(1), 25-40 * https://doi.org/10.32591/coas.ojsa.0401.03025s
Received: 12 August 2021 ▪ Accepted: 26 September 2021 ▪ Published Online: 11 October 2021

LICENCE: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

ARTICLE (Full Text - PDF)

ABSTRACT:
The cult of personality started by the first President of Turkmenistan Saparmurat Niyazov has acquired new dimensions with the present leader of the country. The cult of personality of Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is actively constructed via mass media. This paper examines two short clips of a news report dedicated to the President’s birthday celebration that was broadcasted on the Turkmen national TV on 26 June 2020. The paper analyzes a set of specific mechanisms of flattery inflation used in the report and demonstrates special linguistic choices and visual patterns applied to force a specific ideology on the audience. Due to the multimodal nature of the analyzed discourse, multimodal critical discourse analysis has been implemented, additionally informed by the systemic functional linguistics and the visual semiotic analysis.

KEY WORDS: multimodal critical discourse analysis, personality cult, Turkmenistan, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov.

CORRESPONDING AUTHOR:
Sofiya Sarkisova, University of Guanajuato, Division of Social Sciences and Humanities, Guanajuato, MEXICO. E-mail: sofya.sarkisova2@gmail.com

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