Аннотации:
The article describes the discursive practices of introducing unconfirmed information into
media discourse. Discursive practices are based on English language resources (lexical level) and,
accordingly, closely correlate with the genre properties of fake news text. In general, the discourse
that uses discursive practices within which unverified information is involved is called anonymous.
The author tries to prove that rumours are the prototype of fake news and serve as an anonymous
source of information. In view of media publications discursive practices are constantly pushing
authors to refine and find more effective tools for camouflaging untrustworthy information so as not
to be exposed and accused of blatant lies. One of the most popular types of unverified information is
rumours that realize anonymous information in the media space, and fake news is the good container
of false, distorted information. Rumours are an important source of knowledge about what is
happening in society in general, in politics in particular; rumours are a special source of information,
because it is rumours that people trust; it is a kind of reflection of the socio-psychological, sociopolitical, socio-economic and socio-cultural situation in society.
The article deals with the general scientific methods of synthesis, analysis and methods
of linguostylistic analysis of fake news texts. The article defines “rumours” and explains the semantics
of this lexical unit using the method of thesaurus analysis. Component analysis of the data presented in
the article shows that semantization of the word “rumours” is carried out on the basis of categorization
according to the following criteria: 1) communicative status; 2) nature of communication; 3) channel
of information transmission; 4) type of communication situations; 5) source of origin information;
6) the degree of reliability of the information; 7) the degree of verification of the message; 8) the extent
of information dissemination.
According to the results of the lexico-semantic analysis we distinguish three groups of lexemes for
the designation of false anonymous content: absolute, relatively reliable and completely reliable rumours
