EVALUATIVE POTENTIAL OF GRAMMATICAL GENDER ASYMMETRY IN UKRAINIAN SOCIAL AND POLITICAL MEDIA DISCOURSE

This study aims to define the peculiarity of grammatical gender asymmetry in the modern Ukrain- ian language in socio-political texts to highlight the factors contributing to the expression of certain im- plied pragmatic meanings, as well as to identify these meanings. In this research, we set the following tasks: to review what evaluative pragmatic potential the grammatical category of gender in the Ukraini- an language has; to reveal which implied communicative meanings the violation of the categorial gram- matical norm actualises in social and mass media texts on socio-political issues (specifically, switches be- tween masculine / feminine and neuter / common gender in co-referential pairs); to identify the prag- matic triggers of these meanings in modern socio-political environment. To achieve the aim and com- plete the tasks the contextual-interpretative method (to define the author’s pragmatic aim with regard to the socio-political topic of the text), the method of interactive modelling (to define and generalise the emotional elements of the meaning created and to hypothesise on the possible systemic nature of these means) and the method of structural analysis (to identify the linguistic means that help objectivise the pragmatic intention) are used. Modern discussion of socio-political issues tends to express subjective opinion and emotional per- ception of the facts of reality, which makes it possible to clearly identify the subjects of communication and assign them to the ‘we’ / ‘them’ groups. The article analyses the pragmatic potential of grammatical norms violation in co-referential chains (anaphoric, cataphoric, and exophoric references) by using grammatical transpositions in Ukrainian socio-political discourse. The analysis proves that masculine-feminine / neutral transformations lead to communicative impli- cations with various pragmatic consequences. The understanding of these meanings depends on two fac- tors: the communicators’ mastery of the systemic potential of the Ukrainian language, as well as the com- municators’ degree of immersion in the socio-political issues of Ukrainian society, as a result, the percep- tion of referents varies ‒ they may be marked as axiologically close or alien. We conclude that the transposition of feminine / masculine and neuter genders is the most effec- tive in expressing evaluation, as it forms an opposition to the traditional gender pair and conveys a wide range of communicative meanings. Common gender is similar to neuter gender and serves as a rich source of lexical connotations and grammatically flexible forms. It is the socio-political discourse that is the field for the actualisation of discursively related meanings of the neuter gender: here, the communicati ve-prag- , the communicati ve-prag- the communicative-prag- matic meaning of disapproval / condemnation of the referent is actualised, accompanied by various emo- tional shades and hidden arguments of disapproval. The pragmatic trigger for the creation of this evalua- tive meaning lies in ideological background (the referent is a coward, an ignoramus, a traitor, an admirer of the “Russian World” / “Soviet Union”, etc.). Grammatical gender transpositions in co-referential chains, in particular, the frequency of their use and the pragmatic load of neuter noun forms and the pronoun воно, can be considered a marker of mod- ern Ukrainian communication in socio-political discourse.