The Language of Confrontation in Everyday Discourse: Intentional Depreciation

The goal of the article is to present the results of the analysis of authentic dialogues and the interpretation of the intentions of linguistic techniques and means, including socio-political neologisms, which are used by subjects of communication at the level of common discourse (in particular, in social networks) in order to depreciate the interlocutor. Methods and methodology. During the research a complex of general scientific and psycholinguistic methods was used: recording of dialogues and utterances, content analysis, categorization, typologization, generalization, expert evaluation, interpretation of the results, as well as linguistic, qualitative and instructional analysis. Results. As a result of the study of conflict social political vocabulary in everyday discourse the following types of depreciation are identified: 1) depreciation of the person/group subject status; 2) depreciation of the person/group subject to the status of an animal or plant; 3) depreciation of the person/group subject to the status of an inanimate object. The analysis of speeches on a particular community or person according to this typology also allows us to identify the intensity of impairment: the speeches are characterized by a violation of the symmetry of communication, which ranges from disdain to giving the speaker the status of an inanimate object. A feature of all types of depreciation is the creation of new words and the use of suffixes to strengthen or soften the negative load of the utterance. Conclusions. Conflict language is a display of intrapersonal and group psychodynamic processes, and in its articulation a set of protective mechanisms is actualized, which contributes to the restoration of psychological comfort in difficult socio-political conditions. In general, the investigated conflict vocabulary can be defined as verbally written communication aimed at depreciation of a person or a group subject to achieve or fix individual and/or group subjects' dominant positions in communication. The auto-aggressive nature of the use of conflict language destroys social cohesion, but also has positive functional consequences: its intensification partly contributes to psychological discharge at the individual level and the reduction of socio-psychological tension at the collective level.