Communication and pragmatic peculiarities of esoteric forecasts in mass media discourse of the Russo-Ukrainian war

Abstract

The subject of the study is esoteric projections as one of the ways to create a verbal pattern of the future. The study is based on the text and video content containing esoteric forecasts, fortune telling and predictions about the course of the Russo-Ukrainian War after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by the aggressor’s military. Today Ukrainians suffer from the Russian military’s criminal actions and information warfare organized by the authorities and propagandists of the Russian Federation, they feel permanent stress and are very sensitive to esoteric content that creates an illusion of understanding of the situation, provokes wrong conclusions and actions, which can result in dangerous situations for the citizens. Thus, Ukraine has a serious problem of differentiating between high-quality and manipulative forecasts, which makes urgent the study of its communication and pragmatic peculiarities, verification of the forecasts, and dissemination of information about forecasting content quality. The aim of the study is to accentuate and explore esoteric forecasting as a special type of verbal modeling of the future, which has different communication purposes, specific intentionally organized non-verbal context of the messages about the future and means of linguistic impact on the recipient, as opposed to the scientific and naive empirical forecasting.

The results of this study showed a manipulative nature of the esoteric forecasts — in most cases, they are aimed at attracting an audience to the media channels with corresponding content and forming a social and political opinion beneficial to the sponsors of such content, or required evaluation of the events in Ukraine and other countries. From the linguistic point of view, esoteric forecasts are typically characterized by imperative constructions with the explicitly realized epistemic modality of reality expressed by the modes of faith, knowledge, and belief. This is a distinct feature of the forecasts based on analysis, whereas scientific and naive empirical forecasting is characterized by the author’s uncertainty about the forecasting content, which they demonstrate using constructions with hypothetic epistemic modality and lexical means that convey uncertainty and hesitation.

This study is novel as linguistic and extralingual means of expression of esoteric forecasts under the conditions of the Russo-Ukrainian War were analysed for the first time. It is worth studying scientific and empirical forecasts and determine the nature of their influence on the media content consumers in the future.