Metaphors and subjective-evaluative affixes as means of expressing verbal aggression: nomina agentis in Russian media discourse

The aim of the study is to analyze agentives as a means of expressing speech aggression in lexico-semantic and word-formation aspects. The relevance of the topic is that this linguistic problem has significant social projections. As a rule, speech aggression is considered within the framework of Internet communication, but nowadays it is also observed in the media space. For that reason, the study was conducted on the material of media texts published on various news Internet portals, some of them were borrowed from the newspaper subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. Relying on the linguistic literature of 1997-2022, the author offers a brief overview of the studies on speech aggression in Russian-language media (typologization and means of expression). The author focuses on agentives, which are expressed by metaphors or derivatives with the semantics of similarity or non-compliance with some norm. Using the method of contextualsemantic analysis, in addition to zoonyms, the author presents agentives with the meaning of unreal persons, which, depending on the context, provide an opportunity for the addressee to cause moral damage to the referent, insult, humiliate, discredit, or even dehumanize him. The author considered the suffixes -оид- ‘-oid’ , -уг- ‘-ug-‘ and the prefixes псевдо- ‘pseudo-‘, квази- ‘quasi-‘, недо- ‘under-‘ , as well as the prefixoid лже- ‘pseudo-‘ . The analysis draws attention to the issue of the addressee's awareness/unawareness of speech aggression. The results of the analysis confirm that subjective evaluation is becoming increasingly important in the sphere of Russian-language media. The discrediting of the referent by means of speech aggression is manifested, on the one hand, in quotations of direct speech of a bystander and, on the other hand, in journalists' own statements. The conclusion is that the consciousness of speech aggression is noticeably increased.