Syntactic strategies for verbalising communicative intentions in wartime political media discourse

Abstract

The article presents a comprehensive study of syntactic strategies for verbalising communicative intentions in wartime political media discourse. The research material consists of Ukrainian, Russian and English-language media texts from the period 2022–2025. Syntactic strategy is conceptualised as an intentionally determined model of sentence organisation that integrates linguistic competence, cognitive attitude, and socio-political context to achieve strategic influence on the audience. The study systematises types of communicative intentions and examines their realisation across different language systems, taking into account typological differences between Slavic (Ukrainian and Russian) and Romance–Germanic (English) linguistic models. Particular attention is paid to a comparative analysis of syntactic mechanisms used to encode communicative intentions in these languages.
The analysis reveals that in Slavic languages, communicative intentions are primarily realised through flexible sentence word order and topical segmentation (theme–rheme organisation), which enables dynamic reconfiguration of informational focus via inversion and parcelisation. In contrast, in English, due to a relatively fixed SVO sentence structure, the expression of communicative intentions is predominantly achieved through lexical and grammatical means, including modal verbs, performative constructions, and syntactic parallelism. The results demonstrate that syntax in wartime political media discourse functions not merely as a structural level of language, but as a strategic resource for persuasion, mobilisation, and legitimisation of political action. The proposed framework outlines a four-stage model of syntactic strategy formation, ranging from motivational emergence in a wartime context to final verbal realisation with a predictable illocutionary effect. The findings may be applied in the fields of discourse analysis, media linguistics, translation studies, and strategic communication research.