Signs of extremist text in media discourse

A vivid manifestation of language pragmatics today is invective strategy, which is especially active in social networks. Any actions of social network users during communication can be treated as extremism if they lead to national hatred, contain speculations on human inferiority, and promote terrorism. The purpose of our research is to identify the main types of invectives in texts containing comments given by social media users to news press releases, and determine their main functions. To address this issue, we used a qualitative methodological approach to collecting and analyzing data. Data collection took the form of a sample. We analyzed a total of 300 comments given by social network users on the site 74.ru. The sampling texts had been published over the past three years. The text sizes in the sample did not exceed two or three sentences. The addressees were any groups of people irrespective of their age or occupation. This study showed that most of the invectives in the comments were zoomorphic metaphors (40 %), which are a type of metaphorical invectives. Their main functions are to increase the emotionality of speech and relieve psychological tension. The study revealed that ethnic invectives are widely used in the social network users’ comments to news press releases, which render extremism in the texts. The obtained results contribute to the expansion of empirical knowledge on the issue and can be of practical use in translation studies and psycholinguistics.