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Linguistic and communicative explication of emotions in Spanish and English Internet comments devoted to vaccination against COVID-19 // Tomsk State Pedagogical University Bulletin. 2024. Issue 4 (234). P. 41-49

Due to the outbreak of a previously unknown coronavirus infection in 2020, people’s communication has largely shifted to an online format. The Internet has become an available space for users to discuss topical issues and express their attitude to the reality around them. Changes in language under the influence of changes in the world and ways of expressing emotions in Internet communication have become of interest to philologists, linguists, specialists in psychology and sociology. The specialists conduct studies in order to make necessary observations on the emotional state of people, to monitor public opinion on such an important phenomenon as vaccination, which is still causing a huge amount of debate. The purpose of this article is to describe the linguistic and communicative explication of negative emotions related to COVID-19 vaccination in Spanish and English. The focus of the study is on verbal and non-verbal means of expressing emotions in Internet comments on the topic of vaccination. The selection of the material with a total of 100 Internet comments (50 comments in English and 50 comments in Spanish) was limited to the period from February to August 2021, when the issue of vaccination was actively covered by all kinds of media outlets, including the Internet, causing lively discussions. The machine sentiment analysis revealed predominantly negative colouring of the texts of Internet comments on the topic under study. Stylistic analysis and interpretative discourse analysis allowed us to identify linguistic and non-linguistic means of expressing negative emotions of English- and Spanish-speaking Internet commentators. The identified means of linguistic and communicative explication of emotions were analysed on the lexical, stylistic, grammatical levels as well as on the level of graphics and images. Among the stylistic means visual metaphor expressed by emoticons and images was identified.

Keywords: emotion, emotivity, sentiment analysis, vaccination, internet comment, linguistic and communicative explication, COVID-19