Linguistic means of speech manipulation in the discourse of modern German-language media

Abstract

The article touches upon the problem of identifying and analyzing speech manipulation in the texts of German-speaking media. Media determine linguistic and cultural pictures of the world, so the analysis of media language will help to establish trends of influence on the cognitive consciousness of society. In today’s geopolitical environment, the basic functions of the media transform as they use specific techniques of speech manipulation to achieve informational and emotive effectiveness, allowing for the distortion of the cognitive perception of information by the audience. The material for this study was German-language media texts, selected by means of a total sampling and semanticsyntactic analysis. The relevance of the study is in its linguistic and extralinguistic factors. The author states that in the conditions of information pollution all the participants of communication should be able to distinguish the speech manipulation in the text, to qualify information in terms of its significance or reliability, and to calculate the risks of facing manipulative actions. Taking into account the peculiarities of speech manipulation methods used in the modern German-language media texts, the recipient must have sufficient interpretational competence to allow him to overcome the barriers that prevent the identification and mental comprehension of the means of speech manipulation in the texts of foreign-language publications.The main purpose of the study is to remove some difficulties in the perception of information in the German-language media text by presenting signs of indirect pressure and speech manipulation in them. To this end, the article classifies the basic techniques of speech manipulation in terms of linguistic analysis, and also justifies the expediency of the formations of interpretative competence in the sphere of epistemic vigilance. The effectiveness of this competence in relation to leveling the negative impact of the discourse of German-language media on the cognitive consciousness of the audience is argued.