Introduction

In recent years, many technologies have developed, which, with the advent of the Internet, led to the rise of new forms of communication and interpersonal expression (Cheshmedzhieva-Stoycheva, 2018). Thanks to technological progress and the mass deployment of information technology, communication and self-expression habits have changed dramatically, entailing the emergence of new linguistic practices. Statistics show that 57% of the world’s population use Internet-based media to obtain information, sharpening receptive skills along the way (Fisher and Mehozay, 2019). The immersion into a new language setting underlined the totality of new linguistic forms and styles of communication. Internet media became the central platform for social and public activity, which enables readers to receive various kinds of information with the help of technology (Beloedova and Kazak, 2011; Chen et al., 2018; Clément and Sangar, 2017). Today, citizens have an unprecedented ability to express themselves, make themselves heard, share, and expand their knowledge. The rapid development of technology has changed the way people express themselves (Kaliazhdarova and Ashenova, 2019; Kazak et al., 2017). The advent of the Internet and social media ushered in an era of debate, giving citizens an opportunity to speak without intermediaries and freely initiate discussions. In a way, those networks facilitated public expression and knowledge sharing. New discursive practices have emerged that became paramount methods and means of exchange and expression today. A recipient now speaks in public and talks with multiple speakers in real time (Sahmeni and Afifah, 2019). The numerous online media tools offered for individual and collective liberation act as a trigger and accelerant for social change. The choice of the topic is since the Internet media have become an unusually important tool for communication and marketing. The rational use of visual and textual emotive information is very important for social media marketing because such information significantly influences decision making. The question is how different forms of information (e.g., textual, visual, and audiovisual) in social media affect the reader. For this reason, the emotive vocabulary of the Kazakh Internet media and their emotive impact on the recipient are examined as an example. The choice of article title is also duplicated in methods.

Media content is widely used in all spheres of human activity and for various purposes: in everyday communication, politics, political propaganda, art projects, to display events, and to build public relations, especially at the verbal level (Alemi and Tajeddin, 2020; Posternyak and Boeva-Omelechko, 2018; Solomon and Steele, 2017). Through the integration of media content, language users reimagine writing to enable immediate and spontaneous communication (Dong et al., 2021; Fisher and Mehozay, 2019).

This research focuses on feelings and emotions that constitute an integral part of speech. Recipients were reported to perceive all events covered in media through an emotive-sensual prism. Thus, it can be seen as a medium of subjectivity (Bateman, 2019; Koschut et al., 2017; MacDonald, 2017). That is what unites, to a certain extent, the emotional or expressive function of language, which, according to Jakobson (1987), is centered on a sender, who expresses his/her feelings and judgments through speech. Subjectivity is inseparable from language and discourse. In the modern world, the language of the mass media is the leading language used to cover social and other events in the form of a media text (Suvorova and Polyakova, 2018), an extra-linguistic unit, the structure of which can vary from a grapheme to sound recorded in an audio file. The media text’s genre is determined by its content. At the same time, media texts are associated with the following four principles: functionality (i.e., influencing the masses), communicativeness (i.e., degree of orientation to different strata), content, and intentionality (i.e., planning to affect the recipients) (Alba-Juez and Larina, 2018; Demetriou, 2018; Hiltunen, 2021). Even with one principle in place, a media text is a media discourse.

This research deals with emotivity concept at the junction of several disciplines (Pawliszko, 2016; Polyakova and Suvorova, 2019). Previously, researchers did not describe an emotive media discourse in its traditional sense, nor did they analyze the meta-terms associated with the concept of emotion (such as subjectivity, affectivity, and expressiveness). At least, there were none found. The challenge lies in conceptualizing and language in the context of communicative linguistics, language theory, differentiating emotive lexicography, and identifying linguistic means (i.e., language units and context) that make an expressive discourse. The emotive potential of media discourse will define a range of innovative concepts for media communication and uncover the extent to which media texts can manipulate one’s emotions. The present paper presents and explains a typological picture of emotive vocabulary usage in the Kazakh Internet media with their emotive impact on the recipients. In doing so, this work makes a substantial contribution to the study of the emotive code and functional stylistics. The study results can be used to design lecture courses in humanities, in particular journalism.

Literature review

Internet media are privileged spaces for public and private interactions that offer constant access to any kind of information in real time (Kohrs, 2020). By offering users considerable freedom of expression, online media upend the way people think about language and writing. They became a platform for new forms of communication and expression, which continue to penetrate speech and online communication research (Olechowska, 2021). European scholars view media discourse as an integral part of the digital world and emphasize that it is possible to create a new digital language by shifting from systems to employment (Berger, 2016; Borg and Sanchez, 2020). The starting point could be the new writing type, which received little discussion in the current research on emotions and feelings. In a similar vein, American linguists (Bednarek, 2019) noticed an unfamiliar attitude towards language and how one should use it in online media, where written information flows in odd ways. Particular attention is focused on extra-linguistic units, which emerged along those lines (i.e., through the expression of emotions and feelings) (Khorolsky and Kozhemyakin, 2019; Richardson et al., 2016; Van Dijk, 2017). There are multiple linguistic and non-linguistic procedures for self-expression (Suvorova and Polyakova, 2018; Von Rimscha et al., 2019), and some of those procedures are easy fits for free expression on the Internet (Chen et al., 2018; Huan and Guan, 2020). Kazak et al. (2018) demonstrated interest in how digital users apply written forms of communication to convey their feelings and emotions. The present study has a similar goal—to determine how online media users express themselves in writing and how Internet media influences the public using emotive lexemes—but the primary focus is on media discourse. Overall, the existing papers about media discourse emphasize the complex, plurisemiotic, and expressive nature of media texts (Fuchs, 2021; Georgalou, 2021; Hutchison, 2019).

The existing gaps and limitations in the study of media discourse are associated with the freedom, spontaneity, and immediacy the Internet brings to communication practices. There are also technical limitations. An important point to keep in mind is that linguistic analysis should focus not only on the meaning enclosed within a discourse (semantic analysis), but also on other levels of language (phonology, morphology, etc.). A deeper analysis will show how distinct components of expressive language interact with each other to produce a meaning. The present work concerns the most expressive emotive processes, namely multimodality, polyphony, hypertextuality, heterogeneity, and orality. The aim of the study is to investigate the emotive vocabulary and possible extra-linguistic elements used in Kazakh media discourse. The study objectives are (1) to identify lexical items that designate emotions (emotive vocabulary); (2) to analyze various layers of information associated with the expression of emotions and determine the context of each lexical item’s use; and (3) to examine the standard emotion markers that affect the text-building result.

Methods

In media discourse, getting emotional makes readers feel like they have privileged access to informal discussion. The present study looks at emotive vocabulary from the perspective of contextuality (Huan and Guan, 2020). The focus is on vocabulary items used by the top three media sources in Kazakhstan: Zakon.kz, Kazinform, and Sputnik Kazakhstan (Adindex Asia, 2021). The choice fell on the mentioned media outlets because they are the top Kazakh media and the most readable editions now. Since the work focused on emotive vocabulary, it was interesting to analyze different media, with axially different topics—show business, politics & news, and crime, and to show how the information transmitted by the lexemes affects the mood of the public. The selected online media sources support information exchange by providing users with an opportunity to initiate and participate in discussions. By asking questions and responding to others, online media users build connections. Such spontaneous debates generate noticeable emotional responses. A cognitive approach was used to determine how online media should use emotive vocabulary items to influence the target audience (Posternyak and Boeva-Omelechko, 2018).

The analysis involves a heterogeneous corpus of media texts to establish differences in emotional expression between texts with different themes and genres. The content topics were selected based on whether they are conducive to spontaneous and fast interaction with an invisible audience. Examples are sports-related content, culinary recipes and topics delivering sensation (such as those about perfume, cosmetics, makeup, politics, news, and so forth). Spontaneity and immediacy facilitate the use of emotion markers during text building; therefore, media content that evokes expressiveness and provokes interaction between users seems like a best choice to investigate emotional expressions. The emphasis was laid on the core and peripheral semantics of the most prominent emotive lexemes. This study focuses on the following topics: politics, beauty, fragrance, and culinary recipes. Each domain encompasses a range of threaded messages collected from each media source. Politics-related messages came from Zakon.kz. Other texts were found on Kazinform and Sputnik Kazakhstan. Vocabulary was collected from these media outlets between October 2020 and May 2021. A total of 23,894 texts were collected and further processed.

All messages within a thread, including a question and replies, were collected manually by copy-paste method. The copy-paste method of data collection was useful, but it was cost-effective more for text documents. In Internet pages, applications, programs, a whole copied document preserving the context would take up a lot of space, only examples would become material for a separate paper. Context was omitted, since it was the emotive vocabulary, the lexemes that were analyzed. Media users participating in the examined debates were kept anonymous. Thus, the data collection clearly adhered to the ethics of autonomy and anonymity, using lexemes out of context, without comments or nicknames. The analysis process took place under a mixed approach (automated emotive-semantic analysis of media text and manual verification of emotion markers). Media texts were analyzed with the Tropes software. It is a powerful tool to eliminate lexical/semantic ambiguity, which integrates lexicons and semantic networks and enables cognitive-discourse analysis. Other advantages include an ability to perform stylistic, syntactic, and semantic analysis and to present the results in encrypted or graph form. For example, in the text taken from the Sputnik Kazakhstan news portal, this tool automatically highlighted a lexeme that could potentially have emotive semantics. It is highlighted in the text: «“Оның кγлкісі әлемдегі ең әдемі кγлкі болатын. Мен 8 ай және 2 кγн жердегі ең бақытты адам болдым. Кеше оны дγниеге келетін қызымызбен бірге көлік қағып кетті”,—деп жазды Ашот желіде». The Tropes software put it in the category of positive emotions that squeeze out happiness. It is a stylistic, syntactic and semantic analysis, since the tool sees a semantic-stylistic category. It is used in the media style text and has emotive semantics. Instead of the syntactic level, the lexical level is involved here. Tropes identifies text style and places it in context using the semantic meta-categories. Another reason to exploit Tropes is that it can run an Emotaix scenario to analyze emotional and affective lexicon according to its valence type and writing topic. Moreover, Emotaix can detect all emotional lexical units regardless of their use (literal/figurative meaning) in the written environment. In other words, it allows for syntactic flexibility, which means that writers can change the valence of a lexical item. In this study, Tropes was used to define a semantic classification of emotive lexemes and extract keywords from media texts. Data obtained with Tropes underwent linguistic and qualitative analysis to distinguish contexts surrounding the studied emotive lexemes and segregate topics according to a standard classification of emotions. Tropes divides media texts into content categories under fuzzy logic and counts the frequency of emotive item occurrences using references of expressive terms. In addition to the qualitative method, the present paper used the quantitative method: counting the emotive units used in the texts of the Internet media, as a result of which the most frequently used ones were identified and marked, and their emotionality category representations were determined. The relevant raw data provided by Tropes were not included in the article due to their cumbersomeness and redundancy.

Results

The present study results correspond to its objectives. At the first stage, the lexical elements denoting emotions (emotional vocabulary) were identified. The analysis shows that emotions represent a multidimensional and complex category. This is true regardless of whether their relationship to potentially related concepts is considered or a shift to linguistic concretization and use in discourse is made. Emotions may not be integrated into a discourse at the time of discourse organization, but they were present before that. In this light, the present work turned to various studies (Bateman, 2019; Bednarek, 2019; Hiltunen, 2021; Mahmoudi-Dehaki et al., 2020; Posternyak and Boeva-Omelechko, 2018; Solomon and Steele, 2017) on emotional and affective vocabulary that consider emotions from a linguistic perspective. Available literature emphasizes the difficulty investigators have when recognizing emotion lexicon, but also points to the semantic complexity and polysemicity of such lexical units. This study relies on a somewhat broad definition of emotion lexicon and understands it as all lexical units and grammatical categories related to psychological processes and emotions. In this context, an analysis of different information levels associated with emotional expression determined the context of using each lexical element presented in the examples. Hence, expressiveness of linguistic communication usually manifests itself in the use of evaluative nouns, modalizers, evaluative judgements, etc. In general, emotional processes span a rich variety of linguistic representations. In psychology, emotions are linked to specific stimuli (e.g., events, positive/negative word connotations, positive/negative feelings, etc.), which can trigger the desired response to what has provoked an emotion. It is a complex and short-lived process, often geared towards the idea of movement. In a sense, terms that describe emotions also enclose an idea of movement and action. It is no surprise that such diversity and complexity found reflection at the linguistic level. Emotions in the text can exist as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, phrases, or even sentences (Volkova et al., 2021). Those that are more elaborate are expressed in linguistic terms more diversely. The consequences are the richness and complexity of expressive vocabulary. In other words, because emotions affect behavior, they also affect the way a person expresses him/herself through speech. Media have verbalized sentiments and sensations. This effect is associated with the idea of movement and exteriorization, and there are many words and expressions to channel emotional reactions (Table 1), which generally denote actions.

Table 1 Emotive lexemes which generally denote actions.
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The study offers a set of affective categories that are used without regard to what these affective lexemes compel (intentional function) in the context of a particular journalistic text or what they can indicate (referential or representative function) (Mondal, 2016; Wilce, 2009). The research framework measures feelings and emotions in discourse and explores their syntactic and lexical combinatorics. The combinatorial component allows one to present the actual core of affective vocabulary, the list of lexemes that are most often used to represent emotions and which are the center of most lexical combinations that convey affect or affective evaluation (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2014; Sahmeni and Afifah, 2019).

The study results also examined standard markers of emotion that affect the result of text construction according to Van Dijk’s three-component dimension. An expressive vocabulary can encompass words denoting basic emotions, quasi-synonyms, terms that belong to the lexical-semantic field of the word ‘emotion’, and notions that suggest an emotional focus of a text. The referential dimension of emotion lexicon consists of three components (Van Dijk, 2017): a cognitive component, an emotional component, and a behavioral component. Together, these components form a reference meaning of the term in question. A word that has an emotional component can be used to express a particular feeling. The three-component dimension is part of the applied software and is hidden by its algorithms. Emotions that can have either a positive or negative value are listed in Table 2.

Table 2 Emotive lexemes which can be used to express a particular feeling.
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In both spoken and written language, feelings and emotions can be expressed either explicitly or implicitly. In other words, one can identify the emotional focus of a statement by looking at the context (Table 3).

Table 3 Emotive lexemes in the context.
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Emotions can be divided into subclasses that one may perceive as small lexicons. Scientists recognize four primary emotions, namely joy, sadness, fear, and hope (Van Dijk, 2017). Simple emotions give rise to complex ones. For example, the word ‘terror’ describes a strong emotion, which contains feelings that are less intense, such as panic, fear, fright, concern, and anxiety. This study uses a traditional classification, which allows the identification of primary and secondary emotions (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Primary emotions.
figure 1

Joy, Sadness, Fear, Hope - Based on research of users of Zakon.kz, Kazinform, Sputnik Kazakhstan.

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The analysis of emotives collected from media texts revealed a range of markers that media users frequently apply to express their feelings. The verbalization of universal emotions involved different modalities, explicit and implicit. For instance, users on Zakon.kz tend to express negative emotions, as evidenced by the predominant occurrence of words ‘sadness’ and ‘fear’. These media sources generally yield politics-related content. Threads on Kazinform are devoted to world news. The most frequent emotives in media texts collected from that media source are ‘fear’ and ‘joy’. As for Sputnik Kazakhstan, which includes general themes (e.g., show business, celebrity life, cuisine, tourism, etc.), the most frequent emotives are ‘joy’ and ‘hope’. Given the diversity of emotive lexemes that exteriorize one’s attitude towards things, online media sources can drive on different reportage tactics to influence their audience. Those tactics will vary depending on the coverage. The study limitations are associated with emotive items’ ambiguity. In addition, it is hard to determine how they would affect the behavior of people who absorb the emotional component of the text.

Discussion

Emotions and feelings are cultural phenomena or experiences with a strong socio-cultural imprint. Therefore, one often expresses them through the linguistic prism. Emotive vocabulary is a complex affective category (Angermuller, 2018) because it represents a multidisciplinary concept existing at the intersection of various disciplines, such as linguistics, anthropology, psycholinguistics, etc. (Hutchison and Bleiker, 2017). The present study aligns with the opinion that emotives and cognition are two interrelated phenomena. Moreover, one can notice a ubiquitous appeal to emotions in various spheres of life. Analysis of online media content shows how the strategy of using emotive language in journalism can shock, frighten, disturb, and alarm audiences (Anthony, 2018). Due to their persuasive power, affective categories play a significant role in reasoned speech. An emotional appeal uses emotions and feelings to make people emotionally involved in the argument (Anthony, 2018; Hutchison and Bleiker, 2017; Posternyak and Boeva-Omelechko, 2018). In other words, a speaker radiates one’s own values, beliefs, and ideas to influence the audience. Emotives are a prolific but challenging area for research. Even though it has been a long-standing tradition in linguistics to explore those affective categories, emotives have always been on the sidelines of various theoretical developments. European scholars consider emotivity from a representative or referential perspective. Journalism must not lose its competitive, critical, and independent edge. It must tell people what they do not always want to hear. It is also important to find better ways to provide context and promote understanding so that readers pay attention and interact with the news, rather than feel intimidated (Wei et al., 2021). This study offers a functional approach to focus directly on the linguistic possibilities of emotional expression. Cowie and Cornelius (2003) consider emotive vocabulary as a collection of independent emotion signs. The plurality of approaches led to diversity at a theoretical level (O’Halloran et al., 2019), which, in turn, defined the method of the present research. Moreover, different languages offer distinct visions of a changing reality and, consequently, mean different emotions (Fisher and Mehozay, 2019). Although there are numerous studies on emotions, a conceptual ambiguity in this field persists. The overlapping terms in the field of emotion include subjectivity, affectivity, affect, feeling, and an emotion (Hutchison and Bleiker, 2017; Mahmoudi-Dehaki et al., 2020). It is hard to identify criteria that are specific to each category. Indeed, previous works attempted to do so for classification purposes, but the emphasis was mostly on a system and its components (Flowerdew and Richardson, 2017). Physiological and behavioral responses associated with emotions received special attention (Li et al., 2018). The focus was mainly on factors that influence the functioning of the emotional system, such as duration, intensity, appearance, polarity, origin or cause of emotion, bodily response, influence on behavior, and more. Understanding the new role of emotion in journalism is crucial to this. It is true that representational and referential functions of affective categories do not fit into the fabric of the present work. The study reveals a set of affective categories with reference to the publications where they are used without regard to what these affective lexemes compel (intentional function) or what they can indicate in the context of a particular journalistic text (referential or representative function) (Mondal, 2016; Wilce, 2009). This research framework, nevertheless, constitutes studies that measure feelings and emotions in discourse and explore their syntactic and lexical combinatorics. The combinatorial component of the study allows one to present the actual core of affective vocabulary, which includes a list of lexemes that are most often used to represent emotions and which are at the same time the center of most lexical combinations that convey affect or affective evaluation (Goddard and Wierzbicka, 2014; Sahmeni and Afifah, 2019). The emotional turn in journalism studies is fueled by new forms of emotional journalism, such as immersive journalism and constructive journalism. However, as these innovations are designed to ultimately reconnect journalists with disempowered and fragmented audiences, they underscore the need for a more thorough examination of audience perceptions (Archer and Westberg, 2022).

Few studies are devoted to the linguistic expression of emotions and feelings. On the one hand, it is because conceptualizing this area of experience is a challenging task. On the other hand, emotions and feelings often become a topic for research in other disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology and, more recently, neuroscience. Hence, it would be an innovative and fruitful step to conduct an in-depth study of the linguistic expression of emotions. The results will make it possible to contextualize and comprehend the field-specific terminology and justify the intense and repetitive presence in media discourse.

Conclusions

The analysis of emotive lexemes (different parts of speech) collected from different online media sources made it possible to investigate various emotional expressions used in the Internet media. The selection was carried out according to the classical criteria of emotivity. The study results showed how quite different and quite mixed expressive processes can construct the meaning of the message and influence the reader. The texts of the selected online media are characterized by multimodality, polyphony, hypertextuality, heterogeneity, and carry bifurcated denotational meaning. It was revealed that these forms are predominantly the most expressive emotive process. The present study recognized and described emotive lexical units, analyzed the different layers of information that make up the emotionality of a media text and determine the conditions of the described lexical units’ functioning. The pattern markers that are present in the text and influence textual variations were also studied.

Multimodality was also considered, which characterizes media writing. This research shows that expression of feelings and emotions in a digital discourse requires special linguistic and extra-linguistic means. Online media are a place where people can express themselves freely. Hence, it can be said that media favor self-expression. Content writers have the freedom to integrate any expressive process. Unlike the traditional written discourse, where affective categories are often channeled through lexicon, the digital space is associated with the presence of linguistic and extra-linguistic layers. This study identified lexical and linguistic means that integrate emotions into the online media texts. Those expressive processes are a function of the immediacy and spontaneity of media discourse. Basic emotive vocabulary and possible extra-linguistic elements actualized in Kazakh media discourse appeared to exploit paraverbal expressions to replace expressive means used in face-to-face communication. Such tactics allow conveying emotions in written debates. When it comes to digital media texts, it is not enough to look at what has been said. Attention should be paid to both linguistic and non-linguistic processes. Depending on the purpose of the media text, content writers who seek to influence readers can use emotive lexemes in specific ways. Therefore, it is important to examine emotive language from the standpoint of linguistics and extra-linguistics. The results of this study can be used in teaching aids and courses in philology, psychology, journalism, and semiotics.

Suggestions for future research

Future research should investigate the integration of emotions and their linguistic and non-linguistic manifestations in a discourse. Attention should be paid to the new method of writing that is currently used in the Internet spaces—iconic emotive forms. Such research will form a cognitive basis for studying the iconic coding principle, a mechanism of human associative memory.