Frustration vs provocative strategies: the efficiency of use during a pandemic

Abstract

The article deals with the features of news headlines during the period of high prevalence of coronavirus, Ebola fever and monkey pox. The purpose of the study is to identify the most common speech strategies and tactics, linguistic means which are used to influence the addressee. The author pays special attention to such expressive speech strategies as frustrating and provocative ones. The frustration strategy involves influencing the psychological condition of the addressee, affecting his biological, social or existential fear. This speech strategy is implemented through the tactics of mongering negative emotions and shocking with «facts», the intimidation tactics, the tactics of appealing to statistical data, etc. The provocative strategy is investigated as the intentional conduct of the addresser towards the recipient, destabilizing his emotional state and inciting him to the actions desired by the author. The described strategy is often implemented with the investigating information tactics or the emotionally destabilizing tactics. The article analyzes examples of news headlines demonstrating the use of frustrating and provocative speech strategies, as well as tactics and linguistic means that are used to implement these strategies. In the research the author comes to the conclusion that the authors of newscasts or news articles use such linguistic means that affect the audience as homonyms, paronyms, occasional words, epiphora, metaphor, personification, antithesis, polysemy, precedent phenomena, idioms, proverbs, parcellation.