Linguistic means of forming the image of the head of a foreign state in the American media (based on the material of The New York Times)

Abstract

This article is devoted to the study of linguistic means of forming the image of the former president of the Federative Republic of Brazil – Jair Bolsonaro. The purpose of this study is to study the linguistic means of forming the image of the head of a foreign state, who receives representation on the pages of The New York Times. The subject of the study is the lexical and semantic field (LSF) of Personal Names as a model of representation of knowledge about the leader of a foreign state, as well as the contexts of the linguistic implementation of the core of the studied LSF. The main objectives of the study included the study of the structure and composition of the lexico-semantic field of Personal Names, as well as concordance analysis of the contexts of the linguistic implementation of the Personal Names LSF core. The research material is presented by The New York Times newspaper's 2019 issues of articles about Brazil. Using the method of corpus analysis of the texts of articles using the Wmatrix computer program made it possible to identify the lexical and semantic field of Personal Names in the structure of the cognitive matrix Brazil. Concordance analysis of the contexts of the linguistic implementation of the Bolsonaro lexical unit allowed us to identify 3 leading typical arguments that are formed by the newspaper around the name of the politician. The novelty of the study lies in the choice of the material and the subject of the study: the image of President Jair Bolsonaro in the American media has not been studied by linguists to date. The results of the study showed that the image of a politician is formed, among other things, by building contextual connections between the core of the lexico-semantic field under study and the units that make up the structure of this field, while the majority of lexical units relate to figures of political figures in Brazil and foreign countries who do not support the policy of J. Bolsonaro. The nature of the typical arguments identified by examining the concordance of the core of the studied LSF allows us to confirm that the image of this politician, formed by The New York Times newspaper, tends to be negatively biased. Readers are being shown the image of Jair Bolsonaro as a politician advocating the disappearance of the Amazon forests, being an ultra-right populist and not supporting the rights of the indigenous peoples of Brazil.