Lexical means of speech aggression in Soviet Russian-language print media

The relevance of the article is connected with the prevalence of aggressive materials in the media space, the significance of their role in influencing the audience. The purpose of the work is to identify and describe the lexical means of expressing speech aggression in the Russian-language press of the Soviet era. The research material consists of 500 articles on international topics published from 1946 to 1989 in the newspaper “Soviet Belarus”, published in Belarus in Russian. The methods of semantic, contextual and discursive analysis have been used. In the course of the study, the semantic groups of words used in the press of the indicated time to express speech aggression have been identified. The theoretical significance of the study lies in the fact that determining the specifics of aggression explication in the newspaper texts of a particular period contributes to understanding the characteristics of media discourse as a type of institutional communication. The practical significance lies in identifying aggressive semantic dominants of the post-war Soviet press. It has been established that speech aggression in analyzed texts is expressed with the help of lexemes denoting certain ideologies, aggressive and military actions, crimes and criminals, desire for enrichment, non-compliance with law, violation of communicative behavior, social and economic problems, negative emotions and negative evaluation. The prospects for further studies in the direction are indicated: identifying language means of expressing aggression in the press of other periods, as well as studying strategic and tactical dominants of aggressive speech behavior in the articles of different genres and on different topics.