New Functional Appearances of Stable Expressions in the Media Texts of the Russian-Ukrainian War Period

Abstract

In the scientific research, set expressions attested in the texts of modern Ukrainian mass media during the period of the Russian-Ukrainian war (2022-2024) were analyzed. We consider the corpus of collected material to be innovative, as the source base covers modern information platforms of various types and forms of ownership. In accordance with the formulated goal, the article investigates the functional features and reveals the parametric characteristics of set expressions in the language of modern mass media, and their transformational potential and stylistic role are clarified. Achieving the set goal appeared possible due to solution of the following tasks: 1) to characterize set expressions in the context of the modern linguistic paradigm; 2) to outline actual non-speech factors affecting the creation of transformed compounds; 3) to highlight the topics of publications that use stable expressions of different form and meaning; 4) to analyze negative-evaluative and expressive language units, attested in the language of the Ukrainian mass media in 2022–2024,. It was found that proverbs, sayings, phraseological units, catchphrases, etc. function in the texts of modern mass media. The most stable expressions are presented in texts about the Russian-Ukrainian war, the leaders of Russia and Belarus. It was found that established phrases are actively used in publications about international relations, various problematic and conflict situations, economic, managerial and business affairs, less analyzed language units are recorded in the topics of sports and recreation, art and science, and in lay news. The dominant is formed by set expressions presented in academic and online dictionaries; new formations and transformed known expressions are quantitatively inferior to them. For the most part, established compounds indicate negative processes and actions, often negatively characterize famous persons. Expressiveness of Ukrainian mass media texts belongs to a number of functional features of the analyzed language units.