GRAMMATICAL EXPLICATION OF RUMORS IN MODERN ENGLISH MEDIA DISCOURSE

The article focuses on the grammatical means of spreading rumors in modern English-language media discourse. The empirical data for the research were taken from 21st-century British mass media sources and presented in British media texts, in which socio-domestic and socio-political news was unreliable. In modern media discourse, a rumor is an informational message from one or more persons about some officially unconfirmed events, arising spontaneously or created artificially, distributed and replicated by means of modern information and communication technologies, broadcast orally or in writing through mass media and retransmitted further in a significantly modified form. An important factor is the duration of rumors: they last from the moment they are generated until the moment they are officially confirmed or denied. The characteristic features of rumors include an uncertain level of information reliability, the content of the rumor being aimed at satisfying some psychological need of people that is not satisfied by other means, collective authorship, anonymity, the interpretation of current events during the creation of rumors and their dissemination, anonymity and the mass character of rumors. The analysis of the factual data proves that in modern British media discourse, various technologies for the dissemination of unconfirmed information are purposefully used, among which the following means of pragmatic implementation of rumors at the grammatical level have been registered: affirmative, interrogative and exclamatory sentences, elliptical constructions in headlines; incomplete sentences; questions; the negative pronoun “nobody” in the subject position; one-syllable indefinite-personal and impersonal sentences with the absence of a subject position; generalized persons in the subject position, expressed by semantically generalized and indefinite words; interrogative-corresponding units for the implementation of dialogization; passive constructions that allow avoiding the nomination of the source of information; interjectional constructions.