Communicative-pragmatic Potential and Semantic-grammatical Manifestations of Uncertainty in Modern Ukrainian Masmedia

Abstract

The article characterizes language units with indefinite semantics, which in Ukrainian media texts implement a number of communicative and pragmatic tasks and in some cases even serve as a means of manipulation. The study of ambiguity in the context of specific speech acts and the correlation of the concepts of subject and object made it possible to distinguish between two manifestations of this semantics: clear and partially neutralized. It has been found that to describe situations with a tinge of indefinite, vague, inaccurate expression of someone, something, a certain sign or action, journalists use language units that relate to lexical, syntactic, morphological, and word-forming levels. It is emphasized that the more expressive are those markers that represent a clearly presented ambiguity, while less vivid are the means of expression with a lower degree of expression of the specified semantics. Orientation to the syntactic language level became the basis for the selection of interrogative, probabilistic, and narrative modalities. The emphasis on the morphological tier of language involved the study of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, numerals and verbs, in which the indefinite shade can be expressed by word-forming formants. On the basis of newspaper journalism, a set of indefinitely marked language units is formed, which form the center (nuclear zone), semi-center, periphery, and absolute periphery.