Parentheses of Uncertaininty as a Tool of Manipulation in the News

The paper analyzes the linguistic markers and mechanisms of semantic processing of statements with epistemic parentheses: veroyatno ‘probably’, vidimo ‘apparently’, vozmozhno ‘possibly’, kazhetsya ‘it seems like’, navernoe ‘probably’, pochozhe ‘it looks like’, mozhet ‘maybe’, mozhet byt’ ‘maybe’. Generally, these items express the addressee’s uncertainty in the statement’s truth, but also they serve to form the tropes: litotes, mimesis, antiphrasis, and irony. Such an expansion of semantic functions allows to use parentheses in media to influence the addressee. An analysis of the semantics of unverifiable judgments in a corpus of news texts shows that parentheses of uncertainty accompanying a subjective opinion often indicate implicit meanings with a negative assessment of a character or events and mark non-proprietary speech. Thus, the study of the mechanisms of text comprehension proves that parentheses are one of the tools of manipulative speech influence.