MILITARY AND POLITICAL EUPHEMISMS IN MODERN GERMAN-SPEAKING MEDIA OF MASS COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The article presents the study of the functioning of military-political euphemisms in modern German-language means of mass communication. The purpose of the work is to study the differences between the
use of military and political euphemisms of the German language from other types of euphemisms and
linguistic means of countering manipulation with their help in the conditions of a hybrid war. The material
selected by a continuous sample was analyzed using the contextual-interpretive method. To achieve the
goal, a number of tasks were solved: 1) the concept of “euphemism” was clarified, 2) functional and
pragmatic features of military-political euphemisms were determined, 3) linguistic means of countering
the manipulation of the recipients’ consciousness by using military-political euphemisms in the German
media space in the conditions of a hybrid war were established. After February 24, 2022, a reformatting of
the German-language official discourse in the mass media is observed from uncertainty to condemnation
of the Russian-Ukrainian war. One of the means of manipulating consciousness in the conditions of
modern hybrid warfare, actively used by politicians and journalists, is euphemism. Fixation of war in
the German language develops as a process of euphemism formation and its overcoming: an exposure of
“language corruption” as one of the manipulation types, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, detection
of the so-called “foreign meanings” in the war language.