This thesis presents research on verbal means which implement suggestion in political discourse through the mass media in China. Stylistic and functioning peculiarities of suggestive verbal means are explored on the material of texts of the leading Chinese news websites. Forms of influence, implemented by mass media on the conscience of on wide audience, range from propaganda to manipulation and suggestion. Usually, the success of such influence depends on a recipient's psychological peculiarities and verbal tools chosen by the communicator. In case, if verbal means are chosen to change and correct attitudes, beliefs, and views anchored within certain society, the phenomenon of verbal suggestion is denoted. In terms of commercialization and growing competition on the Chinese media market, which began in the late 80s, suggestion has become an alternative to traditional propaganda as a key instrument of influence on the masses with its undisguised imposing of ideas through mass media. Just as propaganda, suggestion is used in politics. Implemented in political discourse and actualized in the media, suggestive verbal means help to consolidate society regarding important social and political issues, which are considered to be vital for stability of the political system and normal functioning of the society. Suggestion as hidden intentional verbal influence reduces critical awareness and critical perception of the recipient, alters his behavior, intentions, estimates, beliefs etc as a result of verbal interaction with an addresser of a suggestive message and in the absence of targeted understanding and logical analysis. Suggestion is implemented in terms of discourse which is considered as a text taken with pragmatic, social-cultural, psychological and other factors and actualized in mass media in a certain period of time. Verbal means, which ensure the realization of suggestive verbal influence in terms of political discourse actualized in the mass media of China, operate on three discourse levels: a composition-and-plot level, a strategic-communicative level and a lexical level. Suggestive potential is laid in discourse architectonics, speaker's communicative behavior, and lexical tools. On the composition-and-plot level, composition and theme strategies are key verbal means of implementing suggestion. They determine the direction of plot development and thus the dynamics of information influence due to interests of the sender of suggestive message. The strategies in the text are used by author's projection, thus suggestive potential is also laid in features of the author's individuality display and realized through his genre roles and forms of representing in the text. Communicative strategies and corresponding tactics ensure the implementing of suggestion on the strategic-communicative level. The strategies which mainly operate on the level as suggestive verbal means in the political discourse of China are: an introductive strategy, an immunization strategy, a strategy of group identification, a strategy of sensory evaluation, a strategy of modeling the category of time, a motivation strategy. On the lexical level, suggestion is realized by lexical-stylistic and lexical-grammatical means. The lexical-stylistic suggestive means mainly include tropes (epithets, metaphors, comparisons, irony), stylistic figures (antithesis, phraseological units, lexical repetitions, anaphora, tautology), and other stylistic methods (argumentation, questions, repeated lexemes, paremias). Extensive use of suggestive verbal means in the texts of the Chinese media relates not only to the necessity to replace traditional propaganda with alternative instruments of language-psychological influence on wide audience in terms of competitive information space, but also to the aim to preserve control over information, which disperse fast amid multinational and most populous society, and ensure its normal functioning.
