Syntaxical Means of Forming Trust in Ukrainian Newspaper Text During the Russian-Ukrainian War

Abstract

The article outlines the problem of forming reader trust in a newspaper text of the period of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Originality. The relevance of the proposed scientific research in this context is due to the need to study linguistic, in particular syntactic, means, respectively, despite the presence of significant research in the field of journalism, linguistics and at the intersection of these sciences, other scientists almost do not touch on the question of the role of syntactic means in the processes of forming trust in the language of the Ukrainian newspaper in general and wartime in particular. The purpose of the article is to analyze the main syntactic means used in the language of newspapers during the full-scale Russian-Ukrainian war to increase the level of trust in information. The research material included sentence illustrations, text fragments selected from newspapers of the all-Ukrainian and regional levels in 2022-2026: "Vysoky zamok”, “Vilne zhity” plus Ternopilshchyna”, "Vinnychchyna”, “Silski visti”, “Ukraine moloda” and others. The main research methods were descriptive and observational, which were used to differentiate the types of syntactic means of building trust. Results. The article analyzes the most typical syntactic means of building trust in the language of Ukrainian newspapers during the Russian-Ukrainian war. The latest illustrative material demonstrates the dependence of the choice, content and structuring of syntactic units on communicative and pragmatic needs: the journalist's intentions, crisis challenges, the needs of renewed public communication in martial law. The dominance of simple two-syllable sentences over single-syllable ones in the contexts, pretexts, and headlines themselves is traced, which correlates with the transformed reader demand of today - not only to inform, but also to subjectify content. It is proven that in the conditions of the Russian-Ukrainian war, a text without a clearly defined subject loses its pragmatic value, since trust in information becomes inextricably linked with trust in the journalist who relays it, thus creating a reputation cycle. Among the complex constructions in the language of Ukrainian newspapers of the studied period, complex explanatory, denotative and some types of adverbial sentences significantly prevail as the most suitable for building logical causal, temporal, local, etc. connections between facts, which allows the journalist to clarify the content and strengthen perception. The emphasis is on the predominant functioning of active syntactic constructions, and a warning is expressed regarding the non-normative use of passive syntactic units in Ukrainian speech. It is found that the trusting perception of media content is also formed by interstitial units that indicate the source of the message, syntactic parallelism, repetition, rhetorical questions, and "question-answer" constructions. It was established that citation and actualization serve as powerful tools for forming reader trust as mechanisms for non-standard verification of information, and the polyphony of the quotation series found in some newspapers contributes to the formation of an idea of the objectivity and balance of media presentation. The conclusions substantiate the specificity and expediency of using the analyzed syntactic means as a tool for organizing presentation and a powerful mechanism for influencing the reading audience, resulting in trust, which is the basis for effective communication between the media and society.