The analysis of utterances with imperative forms in Hungarian health-related fake news

Abstract This paper aims to contribute to the linguistic detecting of disinformation by providing a corpus-based form-to-function study of Hungarian health-related fake news. It starts from the hypothesis that there is a difference between fake and real news regarding the use of directives as a potential tool of exerting pressure on readers. The most direct and strongest strategy of performing directives in Hungarian is the use of a verb with an imperative suffix. However, the same suffix can also appear without any directive function in subjunctive structures. In order to determine which function utterances containing verbs with an imperative ending have, a manual pragmatic annotation was carried out in our MedCollect corpus. Three major groups of utterances were distinguished: (i) utterances with directive function, (ii) utterances with discourse function, and (iii) utterances without any directive or discourse function. The results support our hypothesis that fake news contains a significantly higher number of directives performed using this direct strategy due to a higher motivation of placing pressure on readers.