A Foreign Country As A Subject Of American Mass Media Discourse

Abstract

The following article deals with the linguistic aspect of representing a foreign country in mass media of the United States of America. Its focus of attention are various means, which are employed by five newspapers on their pages: The New York Times, The New York Post, The Star Tribune, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, to create the image of Brazil. In oder to analyse these linguistic means, the method of syntagmatic analysis of headings and the method of quantitative investigation were applied. This article researches the overall frequency of occurrence of the name “Brazil” on the pages of the mentioned newspapers in the period from the 1st of January until the 31st of December of 2019. The following research analyses the distribution of articles devoted to Brazil over the sections of a newspaper, the typical structure of an article about Brazil, key lexical and syntactic means used in it, as well as implicatures produced by the headlines. The results of the research show that the image of the foreign country in the newspapers of the United States of America is created with the help of distribution of the articles about Brazil in a newspaper and the choice of specific lexical and syntactic means.