Representation of Confrontational Agonal Statements in Political Institutional Discourse (Based on the Trilogy "House of Cards" by Michael Dobbs)

Agonality is a type of communicative competition that provides an appropriate environment for an individual to establish his or her superiority over their opponent. To achieve this goal, a range of communicative strategies and tactics may be implemented. This article discusses approaches to measuring the pragmatic potential of confrontational agonal statements in political institutional discourse. The research is based on the trilogy “House of Cards” by Michael Dobbs, which includes a voluminous number of agonal communicative situations. The analysis sheds light on how verbal competitiveness in the political institutional discourse is represented through the lens of a literary work. The relevance of this study is determined by the absence of a universal system of confrontational agonal statements analysis and intensification of adversariality in the world political arena. The methods applied in the current research include descriptive-comparative, quantitative calculation and discourse analysis. The paper examines the structure of agonality, the basics of argumentation in the verbal competition and the usage of meta-discourse markers in political institutional discourse. For these purposes, a comprehensive model for analysing confrontational agonal situations is proposed, which includes agonal strategies and tactics, types of argumentation and the use of meta-discourse markers. Our findings indicate that the confrontational type of agonality is mainly implemented via theatrical strategy and downward strategy (the prevailing tactics being analysis- “minus”, differentiation, and motivation.) The classification may be extended with the tactics of criticizing (downward strategy) and boasting (upward strategy). Psychological argumentation proved to be more effective than logical argumentation (mainly realised through the motive of public interests and the motive of truth and law).The paper further pinpoints that meta-discourse markers of involvement, self-mentions, boosters, and attitude markers have an influential capacity to secure supremacy in a verbal competition.