Pragmatics of verifiers in the aspect of active processes in Russian Internet media discourse

The study discusses the linguo-pragmatic potential of verification markers in the discourse of Russian Internet media. The relevance of the study is conditioned by the linguistic and general humanitarian significance of identifying and interpreting the linguopragmatic effects of nonstandard use of verifiers as a manifestation of active processes in the Russian language. The aim of the study is to analyze the factive predicates выяснилось ‘ it was found out’, установлено ‘it was established’, подтвердилось ‘it was confirmed’, было доказано ‘it was proved’, стало известно ‘it became known’, etc. in the context of propositional attitudes and their role in the discursive implementation of non-cooperative communication strategies in Russian speech. The method of linguo-pragmatic interpretation of non-usual communicative strategies is used, based on a complex research procedure for describing active processes in the Russian language, on the method of cognitive-discursive analysis of corpus data, as well as on the ideas and principles of foreign applied and “affective” pragmatics. The research material is language data from the newspaper subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus (200 contexts with verifiers). The study describes ambiguous and internally contradictory models of factual propositional knowledge attitudes and their discursive implementation in propositions that do not have a reference to a reliable and/or proven fact. A connection has been established between such cases and models of language anomality, because a speaker normally cannot have contradictory intentions. It is shown that these cases contain a contradiction between the propositional knowledge attitude obtained with certainty and the uncertain content of the proposition. For pragmatic anomalies generated by verifiers, a “conflict of modalities” has been established (reliable and unreliable, factual and hypothetical, knowledge and assumption, etc.). It is concluded that such non-usual uses of verification markers are associated either with the intention of the media text author to implement a manipulative strategy de re , or just with the speaker’s insufficient linguistic and communicative competence within the framework of bona fide . The prospects for the study are in the expansion of its empirical base with discursive indicators of truth ( истинно ‘truly’, подлинно ‘actually’, действительно ‘really’, etc.), as well as by involving other highly influential discourses (political, advertising, poetic, etc.).