Expression of Negation in Media Texts During the Russian-Ukrainian War

Abstract

The article characterizes negation as a generalized linguistic concept of logical-psychological, linguistic-cognitive, and subjective-objective direction. A number of its differential features include the ability to convey negative information about various objects of the environment, situations, actions, processes, states, and properties, usually with an accompanying evaluative and emotional-expressive load. It was found that the media texts of the period of the active phase of the Russian- Ukrainian war present a semantically branched group of linguistic units of different levels, which perform the role of means of explication of negation. It was determined that phraseological and lexical markers mainly represent negation covertly and often acquire a special ironic sound, expressively emphasize the unreasonableness and illogicality of someone's actions, sometimes vulgarize the speech of modern journalism. Emphasis on the word-form realization of the negative content made it possible to distinguish specific (не-, зне-, без-, ні-) and borrowed (анти-, контр-, де-) (anti-, counter, de) prefixes. It was found out that the response of Ukrainians to the challenges of the war was the actualization and production of derivatives with the borrowed service formant де- (de-), which mainly functions in ironically marked expressions. A detailed description of occasionalisms, which testify to the linguistic creativity of the Ukrainian people and contribute to the expressiveness of what is said, enabled the complexity of the research on the means of expressing negation. It is emphasized that the verbalization of negative semantics is related to the morphological layer of the language, in particular, with particles, prepositions, and conjunctions, which play an important linguistic-stylistic role and serve as a vivid rhetorical means.