Linguistic explication of conflict-generating text in the naive and scientific worldviews of Belarusians

The article is devoted to a comparative study of the peculiarities of understanding a verbal threat as an offense in terms of its scientific (linguolegal) identification and perception by the naive consciousness. In the first case, the text of the threat must correspond to five obligatory parameters: subject composition; temporal marking; subject affiliation of the action; type of action; addressee. Understanding of threat in the everyday worldview of Belarusians was established experimentally: respondents were given a task in which they had to select one or several verbal responses that, from their point of view, contained a threat. The content of conflict-generating speech acts was explicated in relation to the survey participants; however, only one answer option corresponded to all the designated parameters of threat verbalization. The experimentally established features of threat perception in everyday picture of the world differ from its scientific understanding: when forming a holistic perception of the verbal offense under discussion, the naive consciousness often hypothesizes, that is, independently fills in individual fragments that are not found in the conflict-generating text. Thus, the data from a survey in which 385 residents of Belarus of various genders and ages, living in all regions of the country, participated, show that a potential danger to one's life, health, and property is revealed in the content of speech acts that do not specify the potential harm and the targeting of the threat.