LINGUOPRAGMATIC FEATURES OF ENGLISH-LANGUAGE ECOLOGICAL POSTERS ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE RUSSIAN WAR IN UKRAINE

Abstract

This article examines the linguistic and pragmatic features of English-language ecological posters on the consequences of the Russian war in Ukraine, based on a corpus of seventy-two posters selected from the “Poster for Tomorrow” platform, the European Green Party’s campaign materials, the “Shutterstock” platform, and an official Ukrainian government resource. A genre-stylistic typology of the studied ecological posters on the consequences of the Russian war in Ukraine has been established, encompassing appeal posters, warning posters, testimonial posters, and symbolic posters, employing verbal-rhetorical means of persuasion. The dominance of directive speech acts, realised through imperative constructions, as well as representatives, expressives, and declaratives, has been identified. The lexical-semantic organisation of the environmental narrative is structured around thematic clusters of water pollution, the nuclear threat, and the destruction of wildlife in Ukraine, in which environmental terminology interacts with evaluative vocabulary, metaphor, personification, and intertextual references. At the syntactic-rhetorical level, the primary techniques identified are anaphora, parallelism, gradation, paronomasia, and syntactic nominativity, which ensure immediate comprehension of the poster’s message and maximise its emotional and persuasive potential. It has been established that the pragmatic impact of the studied ecological posters on the consequences of the Russian war in Ukraine is organised through three interrelated strategies – sensitisation, accusatory rhetoric, and mobilisation – which simultaneously appeal to the emotions, moral values, and civic responsibility of the international audience. A trend toward the juridification of environmental rhetoric has been identified through appeals to the concept of ecocide and to norms of international law, lending the poster discourse institutional characteristics. It is argued that English-language ecological posters on the war topic constitute a variety of environmental discourse, capable of combining documentary accuracy with a powerful emotional and rhetorical impact, and of situating the ecological crisis of the Russian war in Ukraine within the context of the global climate crisis.