Implementation of speech aggression in the genre of Internet commentary in social networks of frontier regions: Speech act stratification, lexical content and thematic focus

Abstract

The network space presupposes communicative interaction, characterized by depersonalization, hypertextuality and achronicity of interaction, a high degree of anonymity and low responsibility for the content produced. Comments reflecting the dynamics of the audience’s mood in real time, which become a factor destroying speech and ethical normativity, are of great importance. Internet comments are the reaction of communicants to the news feed, which constitutes the thematic “anchor” of the entire hypertext space, and can contribute to the rapid expansion of the field of conflict in social reality, instantly replicating provocative, invective and hostile content. The purpose of the study is to identify the frequency of use, speech act specification and thematic orientation of provocative vocabulary, to determine the level of verbal aggression in the genre of commenting on socially significant news stories by users of social networks. The empirical material was the research corpus created by the authors, including initial posts and micro-contexts of comments and sub-commentary reactions from social networks in the frontier regions: Dagestan, North Ossetia-Alania and Karachay-Cherkessia, containing a discussion of socially significant news events for the first quarter of 2024. The study showed that comments are characterized by increased emotionality and broad potential for extrapolation of conflict from communicative reality to social reality. Constatives, invectives, quesitives and directives predominated in network interaction. To emotivize and intimate commentary statements, vulgarisms and pejoratives were mainly used. The largest share of identified topoi is aimed at negativizing attitudes towards situationally tied state policies and ethno-confessional conflictivization. The predominance of soft hate speech and the minimal number of menatives and performatives indicate a low level of verbal aggression in regions with a uniting supra-ethnic religiously determined basis; the absence of such and the intensification of social demarcation in the frontier regions of the multi-confessional and multi-ethnic composition (KCR) causes an increase in the level of the hate speech used in the genre of Internet commentary to average.