TRIGGERNESS AS A COMMUNICATIVE CATEGORY OF MEDIA DISCOURSE AND ITS ROLE IN INFORMATION-PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR

The article presents the justification of the importance of introducing into linguistics the concept of triggerness, borrowed from sociology, to designate one of the communicative categories of media text and discourse. To achieve this goal, the author gives a brief excursion into the study of communicative categories and arguments in favour of treating triggerness as a communicative category. The following definition of the object of study is proposed: triggerness is the ability of a text or an utterance together with its extra-linguistic factors to influence the addressee, causing an emotional reaction and, under certain conditions, motivating him/her to perform certain actions/deeds. The results of the experiment conducted on the material of news texts under the guidance of the author of the article, as well as discourse analysis of the media space allowed to prove the existence of the verbal formulas (semantic-syntactic constructions) that are indicators of triggerness. The paper reveals that modern media discourse is characterized by chains (waves) of trigger statements forming its thematic varieties and shows that the category of triggerness has a significant impact on the perception of events, allowing to manage it. The presented results may be of interest to specialists in the field of developing automated programmes for recognizing destructive texts, as well as predicting the reactions of society to certain events.