Malysheva M. Verbal Aggression in Network Discourse: A Linguopragmatic Approach.

The dissertation is devoted to a comparative linguistic and pragmatic analysis of verbal aggression in the Ukrainian and Spanish segments of the social network Facebook. The author interprets verbal aggression as a subject of linguistic research, analyzes manifestations of verbal aggression in the discourse of social networks, and develops a typology of communicative strategies and tactics within the communicative act of verbal aggression. The relevance of the dissertation is determined by the need for a comprehensive comparative study of verbal aggression manifestations among Ukrainian and Spanish speakers in their interaction in the communicative space of the social network Facebook from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics. Despite the considerable interest of linguists in studying the phenomenon of verbal aggression in various spheres of human life, the problem cannot be considered solved, since the term "verbal aggression" still does not have a generally accepted interpretation, and the available scientific studies that cover the manifestations of verbal aggression in the discourse of social networks from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics are isolated and interpret only certain aspects of this phenomenon. Accordingly, verbal aggression, namely its theoretical apparatus and representation in online discourse, requires a comprehensive linguistic description. The purpose of the dissertation is to conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis of manifestations of verbal aggression in the Ukrainian and Spanish segments of the social network Facebook from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics. Achieving this goal involves solving the following tasks: to define the concept of verbal aggression as a subject of linguistic research and outline the main features of the communicative act of verbal aggression; to analyze the concept of "network discourse", form a working definition of the concept and characterize communication on the social network Facebook; to trace the implementation and model the communicative act of verbal aggression in typical situations of political interaction between social media users in the speech genres of post and comment; to qualify and characterize the lexical and semantic, grammatical, graphic and spelling means of expressing verbal aggression in social networks in posts and comments by native speakers of Ukrainian and Spanish; to identify and describe the main communicative strategies and tactics for implementing verbal aggression in online discourse and compare the speech behavior of Ukrainian and Spanish-speaking users of the social network Facebook; to outline the verbal content and model the semantic field of the lexeme "aggression" in Ukrainian and Spanish based on dictionary definitions and the results of an associative experiment. The object of the study is the destructive speech behavior of participants in online discourse, and the subject is the linguistic means of expressing verbal aggression in Ukrainian and Spanish online discourse. The material for the study was posts and comments by users of the Ukrainian and Spanish-language segments of the Facebook social network collected during 2020–2023, totaling more than 2000 text fragments from thematic communities and private pages of famous personalities (Ukrainian and Spanish-language material is presented in equal proportions); dictionary definitions and the results of an associative experiment (196 questionnaires of native speakers of Ukrainian and Spanish were analyzed in total). The author interprets verbal aggression as a communicative act directed by a speaker at the addressee with the intention of causing moral harm through verbal influence. A communicative act of verbal aggression is a communicative interaction between the initiator(s) of an aggressive action and the person(s) to whom the aggressive action is directed, and the result of such interaction is the infliction of moral harm to the person(s) to whom the aggressive action is directed and is defined as "agressee". The agressor is realized in speech in the form of specific variants – markers of verbal aggression, which, in turn, are represented by means of language at different levels.