Types of invective vocabulary in media discourse

The invective strategy nowadays is a vivid manifestation of language pragmatics, it is particularly actively used by users of social networks. The goal 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 use a qualitative methodological approach of data collection and analysis. The data has been colleсted via sampling. We have analyzed a total of 200 comments given by users of social networks on the website 74.ru. The sampled texts have been published over the past three years. The text sizes in each sample do not exceed 2 or 3 sentences. The addressees are any groups of people indiscriminate with regard to their age and professional domain. This study has shown that most of the invectives in the comments are zoomorphic metaphors (51%), which are a type of metaphorical invectives. Their main functions are to increase the emotionality of speech and relieve psychological tension. The obtained results contribute to the expansion of empirical knowledge on the problem under discussion and can be applied in the field of translation studies and psycholinguistics.