Abstract
The article focuses on the negative evaluative language in British online media texts. The research is based on a corpus of over 600 articles published on the websites of mainstream and tabloid news media, namely “The Guardian”, “The Telegraph” and “Mirror Online”. The texts discuss western anti-Russian sanctions policy and Russian counter-sanctions. The research is targeted at determining lexical means of negative evaluation of the Russian Federation foreign policy. The application of discourse analysis has resulted in a selection of lexical means with negative semantics reflecting negative evaluation. Corpus linguistics tools such as the online corpus query system Sketch Engine and the application AntConc were used in the conducted analysis. These tools enabled statistical assessment of lexical means with negative semantics. In addition, the Sketch Engine tool “Thesaurus” has identified the items which are closely associated with the key notion of the research - “sanctions”. The analysis has revealed metaphors as the other language means of negative evaluation in media texts. Metaphors are known to reflect evaluation implicitly. However, they help create a vivid image in the mind of a reader. Thus, metaphors used by journalists of online media compare anti-Russian sanction policy to “war” and “battlefield”, while its consequences are compared to “a stranglehold on Russia's economy”.
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