LINGUISTIC MECHANISMS FOR CONSTRUCTING A POLITICIAN’S NEGATIVE IMAGE IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

Abstract

The article examines media discourse as a key instrument in constructing the public image of a politician, in particular its negative representation. Drawing on communicative-pragmatic approaches (H. Pocheptsov, O. Serbenska, O. Ponomariv, P. Chilton, T. van Dijk, G. Lakoff, T. Kosmeda), the political image is interpreted as a specially organized communicative construct – a purposeful message with a clear pragmatic orientation which, through emotionally and evaluatively charged linguistic means, programs the audience’s perception. The aim of the article is to identify ways of verbal modelling of the negative image of a politician in contemporary English-language media space. The research material consists of a specially compiled sample from the English web corpus English Web 2021 (enTenTen21) with a total volume of 4,411,893 tokens, processed using the SketchEngine corpus manager. The study employs methods of contextual, discourse and stylistic analysis. The focus is on the media construction of Donald Trump as a representative example of a negative political image. It is shown that metaphor, irony, hyperbole, allusion, allegory, comparison and epithet formation constitute a unified system of tropes and figurative devices that provide semantic visualization, emotional intensification and ideological marking. Groups of comparisons such as “human – animal”, “human – human”, “human – mythical creature”, “human – disease”, “human – artefact” are distinguished and their contribution to the formation of evaluative stereotypes is described. The study reveals that media texts primarily emphasize character traits, intellectual and moral qualities of the politician, thus setting a stable negative valence of the image. Prospects for further research include expanding the genre spectrum of the material (televised debates, podcasts, blogs, social networks), involving other national and international political figures, as well as deepening cognitive-pragmatic and cross-cultural analyses of strategies of media demonization of politicians.