NEOLOGISMS AND METAPHORS OF WAR IN UKRAINIAN PUBLIC DISCOURSE 2022–2025

Abstract

At the current stage of social development, Ukrainian public discourse is influenced by socio-economic dynamics, political conflicts and their ideological basis, as well as the development of media technologies. The study focuses on the problem of the dynamics of Ukrainian public discourse during a full-scale war. The study analyzes characteristic lexical changes – neologisms, phraseological units, metaphors, which are positioned as means of constructing the identity of individual social groups, reflect the features of socio-political dynamics, the nature of the assessment of reality. During the long, exhausting war, the content is characterized by expressive marking and emotional excitement. Among the lexical neologisms of the specified topic, words formed using word-formation tools prevail. There are also new borrowings. In general, the heterogeneity of such lexemes in the stylistic and semantic context can be noted. The neologisms presented in the study were formed on the basis of stylistically neutral, commonly used vocabulary through metonymic or metaphorical transformation and acquired certain emotional and evaluative connotations. Metaphors are organically and very naturally integrated into modern public media discourse. In the media space environment, metaphor easily overcomes the incompleteness and subjectivity characteristic of its semantics. Metaphor, as a rule, acquires a finished meaning in a complete syntactic block. The results of the content analysis of modern public media discourse allowed us to record, first of all, political media metaphors. Among them, the advantage belongs to nominal and – occasionally – verb phrases. The study found that social networks significantly influence the spread of new words and are an effective tool for lexical dynamics