Realization of the modus category of evidentiality in the context of digitalization of discourse

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the functioning of the modus category of evidentiality in media discourse in the context of digitalization. The study of evidentiality is motivated by the importance of identification of the information source and the nature of the information communicated. The purpose of this research is to reveal the features of the representation of types of evidentiality in the digital discourse space. The objectives of the article include analysis of the feasibility of taking evidential semantics as a subject matter in the study of news discourse as well as provision of arguments substantiating the predominance of indicators of explicit evidentiality in news discourse in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The material under study includes 1,000 English-language contexts from articles about the pandemic taken from the website of The Economist magazine via the continuous sampling method. The relevance of the research is due to insufficient study of evidentiality from this perspective, as well as the need to study the axiological evidential meanings generated by a communication participant when constructing discourse. The paper defines global digitalization, describes the features of digitalization of the discourse space, and outlines the role of evidentiality in news discourse. The author concludes that it is important to use persuasive evidential means in electronic news media during the COVID-19 pandemic, which makes it possible to describe two types of this category, depending on the communicative intentions of the author / subject of the news passage - explicit and hidden evidentiality. Depending on the characteristics of the communicative situation, the identified indicators of persuasive evidentiality contribute to an additional substantiation of the reliability of the communicated information and make it possible to exert a directed influence on the addressee through persuasion.