Secondary methods of nomination as the means of modeling the situation of insecurity in a society (based on the contemporary american political media discourse)

The article deals with the description of the persistent mechanisms of modeling the situation of insecurity in the society via secondary methods of nomination. The subject of this study is the methods of communication impact on the audience in order to exert a certain influence on the recipient's consciousness. The goal of the paper is to analyze the most representative metaphorical models that include the concept of DARK, providing the effect of persuasive influence. The research methodology is based on the cognitive-discursive paradigm, namely, the analysis of discourse and the linguistic-conceptual analysis of linguistic means that have implicit meanings that allow for manipulative influence on the information recipients. The article describes the following metaphorical models that conceptualize events and phenomena of a political nature in terms of “insecurity”: The country's economy is a battlefield; Political debates are military actions; Power structures are the enemies of democracy; Immigration is a natural disaster; Computer technologies are a threat to public safety. As a result of the analysis of the identified patterns, it is found that the persistent mechanisms of influencing the audience are actualized through a specific lexical nomination of actions, events and their participants, carried out through the use of militaristic, pejorative vocabulary, invective labels and political affections. In addition, the manipulation of consciousness is actively carried out with the help of methods of imposing presupposition, specific accentualization of meanings and enhanced metaphorization of contexts, which makes it possible to interpret the described events in a key corresponding to the author's pragmatic attitudes.