Abstract
Politics of force today is inseparably connected with politics of images. This paper focuses on the representation of the image of Russia in the British political mass media discourse of 2013-2017. Taking into account K. Boulding’s definition of the image of state as a special concept, the paper claims that this concept includes the notion or nuclear, verbalized with the lexeme ‘Russia’ and its substitutes, and different associations, connected with this notion and thus forming: metaphorical, evaluative and ethnocultural associative layers of the concept. Drawing on the scientific works on problems of mass media discourse, image-formation, associations, structure and verbalization of concepts and using the methods of contextual, critical discourse, seme and conceptual metaphor analysis, the paper reveals the range of means for surfacing the nucleus and layers of the concept ‘Russia, used by British journalists. These means demonstrate ideological values of the discourse in question and stereotypes, which it forms in the minds of British people. The paper suggests that the scheme of analysis of the image of state in the political mass media discourse, offered in it, can be applied to the investigation of images of other states as well as to comparative studies.
Highlights
Politics is inseparably connected with images and especially images of states, which are created and undergo changes under the influence of mass media
Images of states are in the focus of attention of political and cognitive linguistics as well as a new scientific discipline imagology, which studies the laws of creation and representation of images of states in different discourses and especially in the political mass media discourse with its powerful persuasive capacity
This paper focuses on the formation of such image of Russia in the British political mass media discourse of 2013–2017 through the analysis of the linguistic ways of verbalizing the nuclear of the corresponding concept and its three basic layers: metaphorical, evaluative and etnocultural associative ones
Summary
Politics is inseparably connected with images and especially images of states, which are created and undergo changes under the influence of mass media. British mass media wrote much about Russia in 90-s of the 20th century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was positively assessed by British journalists They welcomed the death of the superpower and the formation of the new state free from communist ideology. This paper focuses on the formation of such image of Russia in the British political mass media discourse of 2013–2017 through the analysis of the linguistic ways of verbalizing the nuclear of the corresponding concept and its three basic layers: metaphorical, evaluative and etnocultural associative ones. It gives a key to understanding how images of states are created by journalists in a definite social and political context and how these images influence human minds
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