NARRATIVES OF THE “OTHER” IN TIMES OF WORLDVIEW WARS: TRUE FACE, MASKED FACE

Abstract

Modern day worldview wars are distinguished by the extraordinary role that information and its suppliers play in building perceptions of war events, whether real, falsified or invented. The paper analyses the means by which modern pro-Russian media try to reach their targets in the hybrid/information war. The following narratives are specially noted as defining the current stage of the worldview war against Ukraine: narratives intending to humiliate the dignity of Ukrainian language speakers and the national idea, intending to raise malice and chagrin in speakers, intending to confuse and disorient, intending to involve into pre-meditated ideologems. As concerns linguistic means of recipient disorientation, the following are noted: simulacra, metonymies, resources of semantic-grammatical and semantic modality, logical, semantic and formal hybrids (chimeras), quotation marks and their verbal expression (the “so-called”), resources of sacral language, linguistic mind games, rhetorical questions. Receiver’s confusion is achieved by using linguistic means in a non-typical function, whereby the most common are simulacra, metonymies and the semantic-grammatical modality, and the most effective ones are hybrids of several kinds and mind games. The paper’s conclusion is that ideological tenets of old and new times presented in pro-Russian media in all their linguistic and semiotic variety are imprinted with means which are but missiles for a suggestive, non-rationally-controlled introduction and promotion of pro-Kremlin narratives.