Лексические средства дискурсивного конструирования образа В. Путина в испанских и американских СМИ в аспекте пандемии коронавируса

Abstract

The paper analyses lexical means of V. Putin’s discursive image development in the American and Spanish mass media political discourse with a view to identify culturally specific strategies of the Russian President’s personality representation. The article describes constitutive characteristics of the mass media political discourse and presents a survey of the existing studies on the problem of developing discursive images of political figures and states. Scientific originality of the research involves the comprehensive approach to analysing lexical means of a discursive image development, which includes discourse analysis and corpus analysis using ‘Sketch Engine’ manager. The findings indicate that both the American and Spanish mass media impose an image of a President-dictator who considers pandemic is an opportunity to glorify himself. At the linguistic level, this pragmatic intention manifests itself by the use of lexemes containing the seme “rigid authoritarian politician” (dictator, pharaoh, father/custodian). The American political discourse tends to identify Putin with the virus itself through the use of lexical representatives belonging to the lexico-semantic field with the hyper-seme “virus”. The Spanish-speaking journalists emphasize Putin’s minor role during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is linguistically represented by the lexemes with the seme “sidelines/secondariness”.