FRAME MODELING OF THE DOUBT /СОМНЕНИЕ/ CONCEPT (based on materials from Russian-language electronic media of Ukraine)

For a long time, the concept of doubt in philosophy has been considered both as a destabilizing force and as an incentive for intellectual growth and the achievement of truth. In the context of modernity, doubt is an integral part of scientific reasoning, political discourse, and everyday decision-making, where it acts as a carrier of the meanings of hesitation, distrust, or critical reflection. In the framework of this article, this multifaceted phenomenon is studied through the prism of frame semantics. The empirical material consists of Russian-language lexical, phraseological, and syntactic verbalizations of doubt, selected through a continuous sample of 38 reports published in Ukrainian online media (“Gazeta.ua”, “Segodnya”, “Stena”) in the period from 2000 to 2025. The research tools are represented by component, contextual, and discursive analysis. The frame model of the concept DOUBT, reconstructed in this study, consists of four main slots: EVENT/SITUATION (cause or source of doubt), EMOTION/STATE (internal experience), EXPERIENCER (actant performing agentive or patient roles), and REACTION (external, internal, evaluative, and behavioral manifestations). They are additionally enriched with eleven conceptual attributive characteristics: directionality, causality, duration, phasicity, locative characteristics, intensity, quality, quantity, connections with perception, combinatorial potential, and evaluation. The results of the study demonstrated that doubt, although predominantly conceptualized negatively (associated with fear, indecision, or distrust), also has positive potential, being a mechanism of rationality, intellectual depth, and constructive introspection. Its cultural significance in Ukrainian media discourse reflects broader social dynamics of uncertainty, political skepticism, and collective anxiety (since the sample was taken during the russo-Ukrainian War). This study contributes to linguistic cognitive science and discourse studies and offers practically engaged perspectives relevant to media studies and computational linguistics, in particular, in terms of modeling uncertainty and hesitation using computer programs.