On the language of the Soviet system
A linguistic perspective
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The official idiom of Soviet power, referred to here as “newspeak”, was by no means a random cluster of heterogeneous stylistic features, but a uniform whole that was systematically and thoroughly organised to create higher-level, semantic polarisation. As with all propaganda, the central axis emerged from the separation of the familiar and the foreign, or the “good guys” from the “bad guys”. At the same time, however, the means used to do so covered large areas of what had originally been value-neutral lexis, starting with pronouns such as all or every, as opposed to several or some, adverbs such as always as opposed to sometimes, modal expressions such as must or necessary as opposed to can or possible. In so doing, they had a profound effect on sentence semantics and syntax.
(Osteuropa 6-8/2017, pp. 425–436)