LINGOCOGNITIVE MECHANISMS OF PSEUDO SENSE FORMATION IN ENGLISH FAKE NEWS TEXTS

Abstract

The article deals with the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms of creation of false, perverted, hyper blemished sense – pseudo sense – in the texts of English fake news. It has been found out that each unit of the frame model of the concept LIE (AGENS, PATIENT, INSTRUMENT, BENEFICIENT, TEMPORATIVE, LOCATIVE) is obligatory in the texts of pseudo news, but its verbal content is different; so author’s (BENEFICIENT) intention and the purpose of the deceit are different too – either to exaggerate the news information or to give a false message. The features of verbal filling of two polar frames in fake news texts THE WORLD OF TRUTH vs THE WORLD OF LIE are revealed. The purpose of our scientific research is to uncover the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms of pseudo sense formation in English fake news texts through the reconstruction of mental spaces. In order to achieve the set goal and solve certain tasks, a complex of linguistic methods has been used, in particular for the study of semantics of the analyzed lexical units method of vocabulary definitions has been used. The text interpretation analysis of pseudo news has made it possible to classify them by two textual situations: “exaggeration of information” and “falsification of information”. The verbal filling of the slots of the framing model has been accomplished through the semantic analysis of the nominative units of fake news texts and true news texts. Cultural anal­ysis helped to correlate the content of pseudo news texts with general cultural information, and the method of conceptual analysis in combination with the method of frame modeling and the method of mental spaces reconstruction have been conducted for a description of the semantic structure of the concept LIE, the disclosure of linguistic and cognitive mech­anisms of the pseudo sense formation. The results of the study show that pseudo sense in the texts of false news is embodied through the described textual situations: 1) “falsification of information”, the verbal embodiment of which occurs through the following lexical units: falsification, false, bill of goods, etc.; 2) “exaggeration of information”, the meaning of which is actualized through the following tokens: exaggerate, embellish, extravagance, hype, hyperbole, inflation, overdo, overstate. Acknowledging the fact that the concept of lie (deceit) is the opposite of the concept of truth has contributed to the distinguishing of two polar frames in the pseudo news texts THE WORLD OF TRUTH vs THE WORLD OF LIE. It is stated in the conclusions that the removal of pseudo sense in English fake news texts, represented by two textual situations, requires the disclosure of mechanisms of its creation and comprehension by involving cognitive procedures of termination and extension together with the discursive and cognitive reconstruction of mental spaces of the fake news text components and using elements of the frame analysis technique.