The Manipulative Potential of Stylistic Means in Contemporary Media Discourse

Abstract

The article considers the manipulative potential of stylistic means in modern media discourse. Media discourse is a special type of communication, characterized by high manipulative potential. Despite the abundance of relevant literature on various aspects of manipulation, the study of the mechanisms of speech influence in the media remains in high demand in linguistics. The role of stylistic means which are the basis for implementing manipulation in mass communication remains on the periphery of scholarly research. This determines the relevance of the study devoted to a comprehensive analysis of stylistic figures and tropes that are used in media discourse to manipulate information. The object of the study is the texts of online editions of English-language newspapers, exerting manipulative influence on the reader. The subject of the research is stylistic linguistic means of information manipulation in media discourse. The aim of the study is to identify and describe the means of implementation of language and speech manipulation in English-language media discourse. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that speech manipulation is a verbally expressed type of psychological influence of the sender of media discourse on its addressee, which results in the object of manipulation first having a desire or intention that is alien to him/her, leading to a certain personal benefit or psychological advantage for the manipulator. The manipulative potential manifests itself at different linguistic levels: morphology, lexis, syntax and semasiology. Stylistic means of manipulation include metaphors, simile, personification, allusion, irony, litotes, antithesis, repetition, inversion, parallelism, parcelling, etc. The choice of stylistic techniques of linguistic manipulation depends on the journalist’s intentions, his/her desire to make the text more distinct, to enhance its expressiveness and manipulative potential in order to arouse confidence in the information presented or to impose his/her opinion on the addressee.