‘Ideal Future’ in World War II Media Discourse: Corpus-Based Research of British, American, and French Digitalized Historical Newspapers

Abstract

The paper focuses on the media discourse of the World War II period. The objective of the paper is to show the way the media generated and framed preferable futures of the post-war world and the USSR in media discourses of Great Britain, the USA and France, and to draw attention to the functions the image of the ideal future performs in this type of discourse. The approach taken in the study is a mixed methodology based on quantitative and qualitative methods. The sample was collected from media discourses using corpus linguistics methods. The research data were drawn from three digital resources containing highly representative texts: the British Newspaper Archive, Chronicling America, and Gallica. The authors argue that media discourse about war is a mechanism of transforming the macro-social phenomenon of “war” to the micro-social level of everyday interaction, shaping and maintaining specific values. The image of the ideal future is a fundamental value of this discourse type. It is a discourse-based mental model that shapes and changes social knowledge, beliefs and opinions, exercising a fundamental global control function in discourse production and comprehension. It integrates and modifies the functions of utopian thinking and forecasting: predictive, constructive, modelling, critical, vocative and visualizing ones. The study contributes new empirical and theoretical perspectives on discourse associated with war and peace around the world.