The representation of cold in Russian war media rhetoric: semantic patterns and pragmatic functions

Abstract

The contemporary wartime media space is characterized by the active use of linguistic means as instruments for implementing wartime communicative strategies. Particular significance is attached to lexical units that acquire additional pragmatic load in media discourse. One such group includes cold-related lexical nominations (frost, cold, winter, freezing, etc.), which regularly appear in statements by Russian political and military speakers in the context of the war against Ukraine.
The aim of the article is to analyze the semantic models of the verbalization of cold in contemporary Russian wartime media rhetoric and to determine their pragmatic functions.
The study employs contextual, semantic, and pragmalinguistic methods of analysis, which make it possible to identify linguistic models of cold-related nominations and to determine the specific communicative intentions of wartime rhetoric that they realize.
The analysis demonstrates that in the statements of Russian speakers, cold and the winter period are verbalized as elements of a rhetoric of pressure, threat, and intimidation. The study identifies a variety of semantic models in which cold is used to forecast infrastructure damage and simultaneously serves as a means of legitimizing strikes on energy facilities. The results obtained allow the verbalization of cold to be interpreted as a discursively significant element that shapes characteristic semantic and pragmatic configurations of contemporary Russian wartime rhetoric. A promising direction for further research is the study of the cultural and symbolic sources underlying the activation of the image of frost in Russian discourse, particularly in folkloric narratives, which would make it possible to trace the connection between contemporary models of wartime rhetoric and their cultural foundations.