Cognitive and Pragmatic Features of the Ukrainian Army Humorous Discourse in Social Media

Abstract. Research on humor and laughter is carried out in many areas of cognitive linguistics and psychology, psycho- and sociolinguistics. Humor is viewed as a positive emotion evoked by the cognitive processes of evaluating comical utterances in various social settings (Martin, 2007). The aim of the paper is explore the cognitive and pragmatic aspects of the Ukrainian military humorous discourse in social media. To this end, linguistic methods of discourse analysis, contextual and intuitive logical interpretative analysis, and a psycholinguistic method of content analysis were applied. The study is based on the selected corpus of Internet memes and amusing comments taken from social media and further divided into thematic groups. The results of the study indicate that constructive humor comprising 47 per cent of the analyzed texts tend to be more popular than other psycholinguistic types. Its pragmatic purpose is to provide a positive impact on the process of group formation due to its capacity to facilitate interpersonal contacts between individuals by evoking positive emotions. Self-sustaining humor embracing 33 per cent of the analyzed texts manifests the speaker’s ability to preserve a humorous viewpoint of any life events. “Black humor” and derogatory humor are less frequent in the Ukrainian Army discourse of social media covering only 20 per cent of all analyzed texts.