Oksana Pavlychko, Ph.D.

Sommer Semester 2022

Oksana Pavlychko currently conducts research on the question of “Modern Propaganda Language and Information Wars”.  Wars require strong support from the countries involved in their own population. In order to achieve this, the political language is adapted to the political goals, propaganda is created. This has been extensively researched within so-called polito-linguistics, most prominently on the example of the Second World War and war rhetoric in Nazi Germany. But not only under the censorship of a dictatorial regime linguistic choices reflect ideological, political, cultural and other nonlinguistic content. Every text about any war does this makes numerous choices of the lexical material, but also about framing, presuppositions, implicatures and other rather implicit ways of information transfer. Especially against the background of the current media landscape and especially with regard to the coverage of the war in Ukraine, research into propaganda language, black rhetoric and information wars is of the utmost importance.

The aim of the project is to use a corpus of media reports discussing the path to the current aggression on Ukraine and on the reality of the war currently taking place to examine linguistic features in correlation with ideological and political content and positions. 

In cooperation with the colleagues in Graz, a concrete publication project is to be developed as a result of the project. In addition, the creation of a complex university course with the colleagues for use in Austria and in Ukraine after returning to Ukraine entitled: Modern Propaganda Language and Information Wars. The scientific novelty and topicality of such a course in the context of a hoped-for reconstruction of Ukraine, including the educational institutions, is of enormous value.

Oksana Pavlychko is associate professor of the department of Germanic Philology, Taras Shevchenko Kyiv national university, Ukraine. She teaches practical and theoretical courses on Intercultural Communication: Rhetoric and Argumentation; Contrastive Linguistics (Phraseology); Syntax and Stylistics of the German language; Practical Course of German, etc.