“Storming” of the Capitol in German online media as an example of conflict political discourse

The research aims to expand the boundaries of scientific knowledge in the field of understanding the problem of representation of acute political events by the media as a reflection of their author’s perception, which finds expression in linguistic consciousness and linguistic worldview. The article provides a political and linguistic analysis of the event “storming the Capitol” from the point of view of its presentation in the texts of German online media. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that politics in this work is considered as a speech activity, and the acute situation, which was the “storming of the Capitol”, is studied from the standpoint of its historical and linguistic representation, taking into account the ability of the language of the media to create the desired political interpretation of acute situations. This reflects the pragmatics of the media, capable of talking about similar political events in different ways, creating the prerequisites for the public perception of similar phenomena. The results obtained showed that the event of the “storming” of the Capitol, which took place on January 6, 2021, is described by German media using conflict-generating vocabulary, lexical units that reveal the manifestation and linguopragmatics of the conflict through the pragmatic potential of linguistic units that reflect the substantive side of classical conflict rhetoric, as well as the tactics of invective.