Expressive modals in Telegram media channels and their manipulative potential

Abstract

The paper studies the frequency of expressive modals, which mean ‘categorical affirmation’ (the words sushchii, ehtakii, poistine, formennyi) in the news of 17 official Telegram media channels in Russian. We test the hypothesis whether there is a correlation between the frequency of use of those lexemes and, firstly, the stylistic features of the Telegram channels, and secondly, the frequency of use of parentheses with epistemic modality (konechno ‘of course’, veroyatno ‘probably’, vidimo ‘apparently’, mozhet byt’ ‘maybe’, etc.) in the texts of these channels. We conclude that the rare use of expressive modals in editorial texts may indicate not only the “restrained” style of the media, but also partly their political orientation (all sources that are blocked in Russia rather avoid using such words), while the frequent use of such modals, on the contrary, allows us to assume excessive subjectivity of the source and, as a consequence, its possible manipulative intentions. However, no direct correlation is found with the exceeding or not exceeding expectations of the number of parentheses of (un)certainty in the news of different media.