LEXICAL MEANS OF EXPRESSING VERBAL AGGRESSION IN SOCIAL NETWORKS (BASED ON THE MATERIALS OF COMMENTS ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER ON THE PAGES OF P. POROSHENKO AND V. ZELENSKY)

Abstract

The article characterizes the lexical means of realizing the conflictual communicative behavior of social network users. The network comments presented on the official pages of Ukrainian politicians - the current President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi and the previous President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko - in the Facebook and Twitter social networks were considered. The concept of verbal aggression is defined as a means of implementing conflictual communicative behavior. The genre specificity of comments in social networks is outlined and the peculiarities of their functioning are determined. Lexical units, which are verbal markers of aggressive behavior of commentators in social networks, were analyzed. The purpose of the study is to identify the main lexical means of implementing verbal aggression in the political discourse of social networks. The object of analysis is the conflictual communicative behavior of social network users; the subject of the study is the verbal aggression of commentators on the official pages of Ukrainian politicians. The material for analysis was comments on posts on the official pages of Ukrainian politicians Volodymyr Zelenskyi and Petro Poroshenko on Facebook and Twitter for the year 2023. In total, more than 2,000 comments were analyzed. The lexical means of expressing verbal aggression were analyzed based on the material of those comments that characterize politicians, rather than direct communicators – supporters of one of the Ukrainian presidents. It has been proven that the main means of representing verbal aggression in comments to the posts of Ukrainian politicians on Facebook and Twitter are anthroponyms, stylistically reduced vocabulary, invectives, jargonisms and reminiscences and quotes of politicians’ speeches.