RHETORICAL DEVICES OF POLITIQUEMENT CORRECT

Maria COTLĂU Universitatea de Stat din Moldova

Abstract

The French phrase Politiquement Correct, the English calque Politically Correct denotes a sociopolitical phenomenon that is manifested by the excessive mitigation of linguistic formulations. The French phrase resembles that of the American one, with the common name and ideological foundation, the right to equality, but the French version emphasizes linguistic reformulation. Detached from the American social and political context, the expression Politiquement Correct elevates excessive caution to a dogma level, the art of “correct” speech, but both subjected to social control of language. The targeted phenomenon pretends to be a tool of vigilance to use an expression or a word, to remove non-respectable terms from language and to find them the right equivalences. True to its ideology language having a positive effect, Politiquement Correct employs linguistic and rhetorical tools by modeling them in the service of goodwill and juggles with different syntactic and semantic methods. Through paraphrasis as reformulation, the phenomenon becomes legitimate, then the emphatic discourse helps: litota, euphemism, perifraza, metonymy, synecdoca, oximoron etc. Keywords: politically correct, paraphrasis, emphatic discourse, lithotomy, euphemisms, periphrasis, metonymy, oxymoron, pleonasm.