Medialinguistic approach to identifying characteristics of a social group (towards the methods of linguistic expertise of media text)

Abstract

The problem of qualifying features of the “social group” in the course of linguistic expertise is considered. This concept is the subject of scientific discussions in various fields of science and practice: in psychology, sociology and social philosophy, in the theory of law and judicial practice. This state of affairs makes it difficult to carry out a linguistic examination of texts when answering the question of the presence in the precedent text of certain speech actions committed “against persons allocated on the basis of belonging to a social group”. The difficulties faced by linguistic experts are fully understood by lawyers, both theorists and practitioners, as evidenced by the extensive research literature on the concept of “social group” in the context of article 282 of the criminal code. In expert linguistic practice, the problem of uncertainty discussed concepts could be partially solved by appeal to metalinguistically analysis. From the methodological principles of media linguistics as a scientific direction for this particular task of expert practice, the following are important: an activity approach to speech practice, mandatory consideration of the audience factor, recognition of the polycode of media text as its ontological feature. The article presents the fragments of two expert studies of the author of this article (case studies 1 and 2), which show that the formulated media-linguistic approach to the issue of the social group highlights the nature of the activity of precedent persons, which is perceived as a characteristic of a certain social group. Such activity can have a verbal representation in the media text, but more often it is given through heterogeneous components of the media text: shown (visualized) in images, implicitly indicated in the navigation tags.