RUMOURS AS A PROTOTYPE OF FAKE NEWS: LEXICAL LEVEL

Abstract

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