The linguistic and stylistic space of the comic during the Russian-Ukrainian war

Abstract

One of the responses of the Ukrainian society to the Russian aggression and the concomitant existential danger has been the rise of a humorous culture which constitutes an attempt to come to terms with the traumatic situation, to change its terrible obviousness, and to weaken its destructive mental impact. "The language of war" has been extensively examined by Ukrainian linguists studying media, poetic, and spoken discourse that reflects the socio-cultural changes brought about by a large-scale war. The paper aims to establish the discursive factors that play a role in the development of Ukrainian humorous culture during the Russian aggression, namely: a) to determine the units of language levels and linguistic phenomena that make up the structure of humorous communication of the wartime period; b) to identify the types of contexts that support the implicit semantics of comic messages; c) outline precedent names, texts, and situations that create the basis for comic effects; d) to reveal the role of linguistic and cultural codes in the realization of humorous effects. In the research process, the semasiological procedure of field modeling was used, as well as the methods of component, distributive, contextual, and contextual-interpretive analysis. Results. The mechanisms of humorous discourse are the use of ergonyms with zero referentiality, interaction of homonyms with general and special semantics, contextual relations of stylistically marked vocabulary of different styles, anthropomorphization of chrematonyms, violation of the logical symmetry of oppositions, etc. As a result, the axiological, deontic and optative modalities are realized. Originality. The humorous mode of communication arises as a result of the violation of standard ideas about the semantics and combinatorics of language forms, as a result of which a language game unfolds which builds an alternative picture of the world. Conclusion. During the war period in Ukraine, the "language of laughter" reflected an evaluative polarization of anthroponyms and toponyms common in the mass media; the anthropomorphization of chrematonyms, the expansion of the functions of ethnophilisms, the introduction of technical terms into folklore texts; revision of gender marking of associative fields, expansion of stylistic functions of transliteration and cross-language paronymy; deepening the dependence of implicit information on precedent phenomena and background knowledge deployed in media content. Resources of the lexical-semantic level became dominant in terms of functionality in comic messages; they were supported by socio-political and psychological contexts. In the process of humorous communication, the mental scenario of the Bible is actualized, ideological myths are debunked. The repertoire of anthropic, spatial, temporal, biomorphic and artifactual codes of linguistic culture is being realized. The perspective of research is connected with the study of the morphological level of discourse of laughter during the martial law period.