Markers of verbal aggression in commentaries of social network «VKontakte»

The aim of the article is to identify, study and describe markers of verbal aggression based on materials taken from commentaries of social networks. Special focus is on punctuational markers of communicants’ verbal aggression. Commentaries of virtual public of social network «VKontakte», which genre can be defined as humorous, served as materials for research. Methods. To achieve the aim, following methods were used: analysis, synthesis, observation, classification, description. Novelty of the article includes the statement of the Internet being the key space for communication and therefore a global conflict environment. It happened due to intelligible reasons connected with such features of cyberspace as relative anonymousness, ephemerality. Markers of verbal aggression were widely described in real interpersonal communication, in social media, but not in commentaries in social networks. The analysis showed that in commentaries in social networks there may be found dialogues which could help develop the conflict, where we may highlight not only the markers of verbal aggression such as lexical, grammatical, or pragmatic, but also punctuational ones due to the meaning of punctuation marks in cyberspace, which also may be included in the notion of semiotics due to its sign nature. These results have deepened the current knowledge about conflict genesis of cyberspace and types of verbal aggression and may be used for other articles, lectures and seminar programs in conflict studies, semantics, discourse analysis, psychology. The systematization of markers of verbal aggression adds to the theory of Internet discourse and widens the definition bank of theory of language and Internet linguistics.