Verbalization of aggression in internet comments on socio-political videos (based on the “Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen” television channel)

The study aims to identify the methods and characteristics of the verbalization of aggression in German-language internet comments on socio-political video messages. Verbal (speech) aggression is considered in the article as a specific communicative behavior of a speaker, manifested in both the surface and content components of an utterance in the form of linguistic markers; this behavior is driven by the speaker’s hostile, negative attitude toward a certain target of aggression and reflects their negative emotions. The scientific novelty of the study lies in identifying and describing typical methods of verbalizing aggression used in German internet comments on socio-political messages, which reflects the specifics of speech aggression within this type of online genre. Based on the conceptualization and systematization of scholarly approaches to the interpretation of the “verbal aggression” conceptual construct, a multidimensional characterization of this communicative phenomenon is presented. Through the investigation of empirical material, linguistic markers of aggressive speech behavior characteristic of German-language internet comments – including graphic, lexical, grammatical, and word-formation means that verbalize aggression in the message text – are identified and analyzed. It is noted that the aggressive nature of a message is primarily detected during the interpretation of the content plane of the internet comment, since hostile and negative meanings are often not explicitly expressed in the surface structure of the utterance.