Delegitimising Potential of the “Friend-Foe” Axiological Opposition (Exemplified by English-Language Political Internet Comments)

Abstract

The article considers the axiological opposition “friend-foe” on the material of non-professional political discourse. English-language comments to the posts of Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York City, and Sadiq Aman Khan, Mayor of London, published in 2016–2021 in social networks are analyzed in the linguapersonological aspect. The speech techniques of expressing the “friend-foe” binary used in discrediting the current government by users of social networks are revealed. The authors of the comments use various means of verbal aggression to undermine the legitimacy of the authorities. At the lexical level, invective and pejorative units are used. At the grammatical level, the users have recourses to imperative constructions and the superlative degree of adjectives with negative evaluation. Internet users’ comments to politicians’ posts in social networks are shown to form the image of a political actor on the basis of the dominants ‘deviant behaviour’, ‘bad manager’, ‘foe, not their own’, which are determinants in discrediting the authorities. Delegitimising characteristics-determinants used in American and British non-professional political discourse are revealed to be similar due to the general unification and globalization trends. When writing a negative response, the universal institutional characteristics of a politician come to the fore. The unique individual and personal characteristics of mayors are also found to be important in creating a more voluminous image of an illegitimate leader.

Keywords

• internet comment
• non-professional political discourse
• delegitimation
• “friend-foe”
• semantic invariant