CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF STIGMATIZED PRESUPPOSITIONS IN MASS MEDIA

The aim of this article is to identify manipulative strategies with stigmatized presuppositions which have the greatest impact on the audience in the media discourse. The author considers stigmatized presuppositions as a means of the opposition between the categories “the native” – “the outsider”, where “the outsiders” often described with stigmas referring to negative presuppositions of the recipient. Manipulative potential of stigmatized presuppositions lies in their possibility to transmit false ideas about the object, whether by adding some irrelevant attributes to this object, or by implicating a fallacious presupposition. The research includes methods of descriptive, qualitative and quantitative analysis of manipulative manifestations in media discourse. The samples of manifestations of manipulative discourse were selected from the popular media sources: The Guardian, The Times, the CNBC, the BBC, The CNN, YouTube, Medium, blogspot.com, reddit.com. During the research the following strategies exercising stigmatized presuppositions were revealed, namely appeal to personality, social categorization, gender and race stigmas, cacography and self-stigmatization. The manipulative potential of the strategies was estimated by the focus group. The mechanism of manipulation was analyzed in the framework of each strategy, identifying the use of fallacious attribution and emotionally loaded semantization. This section is expected to contribute to the discourse analysis of linguistic manipulation and suggests prospect of further research in this field.