PUBLIC IDEOLOGISATION BY MEANS OF THE “NEW WOODEN LANGUAGE"

Abstract

The so-called “wooden language” of the political and journalistic discourse in today’s Romanian language is evaluated as a means of ideological persuasion that can be associated to the one used during the communist regime. This association can be made because it has similarities in external/internal sources and resources for linguistic patterns, usage of codes, linguistic violence etc. The reason
why the press and the audio-visual discourse turn into wooden language is that mass-media, assuming the authority of being the fourth power of the democratic state, reinforces its status through a “performant” discourse. Analysing these aspects from a pragmatic point of view, we can see that the use of the wooden language for the press and politics is related to the Coserian concept of “functional languages”, thus having a justification for rejecting it, starting from ethical and aesthetic criteria.