TITLE:
Tools of Explicit Propaganda: Cognitive Underpinnings
AUTHORS:
Ievgeniia Bondarenko
KEYWORDS:
Conceptual Structure, Construing the World, Explicit Propaganda, Fake News, Joint Attention
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Modern Linguistics,
Vol.10 No.1,
February
10,
2020
ABSTRACT: The article aims to account for the impact of explicit political propaganda by way of divulging the cognitive mechanisms of its main tools. This is a case study of 600 fake news narratives about the political and military crisis in and around Ukraine in 2015-2018 enlisted and analyzed as such on the website EU versus Disinfo. In the analysis, I depart from the basic principles of cognitive linguistics and consider the tools of explicit propaganda divided accordingly. The rationale of the first and the second groups of tools is a balance of the logical (like joint attention) and the emotional in human perception. The third group of tools explores the pivotal role of language (in particular, its lexical units and conceptual structures as their underpinning) in construing the world. Considering the third group of tools, I also pinpoint various semiotic codes (verbal and visual) in their combination as a factor that has a great potential for influencing human cognition.