Verbal Aggression of Sports Fans as a Response to Provocative Journalistic Texts about Figure Skating

Linguistic conflictology is a branch of pragmatics that focuses on aggressive speech behavior patterns. This research featured provocative reports about figure skating and online comments as response. This conflictogenic area provides an iconic case study that makes it possible to trace a conflict through all its stages, i.e., origin, course, and escalation. To profile the aggressive online verbal behavior of sports fans, the authors classified their comments by the provocative stimulus and then graded the stimuli by the efficiency of provocation. To establish the speech means and stylistic devices of negative response, they applied multimodal discourse, contextual, and content analyses, as well as the methods of classification and statistics. The resulting classification of aggressive comments depending on the stimulus and its degree of provocativeness was supplemented with a list of linguistic means of negative emotional response. The list of text elements bound to evoke negative comments included: structural components (headlines, leads, images, etc.); semantic blocks about skaters and coaches provided with the author's subjective assessments; linguistic techniques (generalization, negative intensification, escalation, belittling, etc.); names of the journalist(s) and the media responsible for the publication.