Language aggression in the information space: Between style norm and destruction

Abstract

This article investigates theoretical issues as well as functional and stylistic manifestations of language aggression in the information space. A genus-species connection is established between the terms ‘evaluation’ and ‘language aggression’. The term ‘evaluation’ refers to the critical analysis of socio-political, economic, and cultural processes and indicates the dynamics of stylistic norms and language aggression which affects genre and style of mass media, aesthetic criterion of standard language norms, and a universal and national values scale. The author analyzes a philosophical and evaluative paradigm of the means of negative axiology to denote the concepts of ‘state,’ ‘power’, and ‘war’ relevant to the conditions of today’s Ukraine. The article concentrates, in particular, on the dynamics of the language aggression expression in the 20th — early 21st century, namely on expanding the role of genre in using the language aggression in which a status of communication participants is shifted to a journalist and its reader. In this sense, the modality of the mass media’s duty is addressed to the processes and phenomena within the state, in particular to the authorities and external challenges of the Russian-Ukrainian war. A special emphasis is placed on the implementation in the mass media of the current functional and stylistic potential of language to express the socio-political and philosophical confrontation of hostile parties in the context of the division of values into their own and others. The paper examines vocabulary, phraseology, metaphors, epithets, means of expressive syntax, the phenomenon of desymantization of terminology, and formation of new synonymous series, which are indicative in modern texts and express linguosophy of universal and national social consciousness. Keywords: language aggression, evaluation, negative evaluative language means, semantics, semantic and stylistic function, synonyms.