POLARIZATION IN MEDIA POLITICAL DISCOURSE ON THE WAR IN UKRAINE: CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

The subject of the article is the history of discourse development, the current situation, the characteristics of language at different stages, and its problems. The object of the study includes various practices of political media discourse in Chinese and foreign communication space, including traditional media, documentaries, virtual space and other media. We accomplished the following tasks in the research : 1) Described the history of the development of political discourse in China and the characteristics of each stage of its development in both Chinese and international dimensions. 2) Identified the problems and challenges facing the development of Chinese political discourse at present. 3) Attempt to find ways to solve the problems of discourse development and look into the future. The paper uses the methods of case analysis, comparative and descriptive analysis, as well as generalization and outline. Critical discourse analysis, multimodal discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, narrative theory and intercultural communication methodology served as the theoretical basis. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that it presents a comprehensive picture of the development and transformation of Chinese political media discourse in recent years from a macroscopic perspective, and summarizes the features and new trends in Chinese political communication. The results of the study show that Chinese political media discourse has achieved the transition from unidirectional ideological output to diversification of content and form. From a linguistic perspective, it can be determined that Chinese political media discourse at this stage faces developmental challenges such as monotonous vocabulary, limited narrative, lack of audience adaptation and cultural differences. In the context of the new era, Chinese political media discourse should enrich vocabulary and sentences, utilize different linguistic styles of speech, change narrative perspective and adapt to cultural differences.

Based on critical discourse analysis conducted on the media reports which cover the articles from British and US press, the research gives insights into the common Russian propaganda narratives which have been spread over the last decade on Ukrainian sovereignty and the war unleashed by Russia on the territory of Ukraine. The linguistic analysis of the confl ict rhetoric covers pragmatic and semantic elements with the implied negative assessment of Russian policy. With Critical Discourse Theory and Analysis, Critical Metaphor Analysis and Positioning Theory applied, the research classifi es the positioning of the main actors as aggressors or victims and describes the discursive strategies used for countering and dispelling the fake Russian narratives. The study reveals the causes and implications of the analysed practices, identifi es the linguistic means used for the realisation of the discursive strategies and shows how emotional triggers engage readers through lexical-semantic means and stylistic fi gures. Key words: critical discourse analysis, discursive strategies, linguistics means, stylistic fi gures, Russian fake narratives, war in Ukraine.

Applying Critical Discourse Analysis as a conceptual framework for investigating gender stereotypes in political media discourse

The analysis of cultural context in media texts can contribute to understanding how national images are constructed in the international media discourse. The image of a country is better understood by the audience of another country when it is introduced through familiar cultural concepts and well-known experiences so that specific, culture-bound elements of the other culture are brought closer to the target audience.The research provides linguo-cultural analysis of Russia’s portrayal in political media discourse in English-speaking countries drawing on the approach to political discourse as the process of production and interpretation of a text in meaningful political, social and cultural context.The study is aimed at exploring British and U.S.A. mass media to reveal typical features of the English-language political discourse concerning Russia and to find out how Russia’s image is constructed. In the course of the study we examined culture-bound lexicon in texts of various genres of political discourse in mass media focusing on Russia. Further, the use of Russian culture-bound items without translation in British and American mass media was analyzed, and such items were classified into categories according to their contextual functions.The results indicate that Russia is deeply integrated into the cultural context of the English-speaking audience; it can be said that Russia’s image in the Anglophone political media discourse is outlined with the aid of various cultural-bound associative, connotative and metaphorical links which are familiar for native readers and serve them as a bridge facilitating their understanding and interpretation of Russian culture.

This paper examines the power of words in political campaign discourses in Kenyan media. The study focuses on the several meanings of concepts employed by politicians in the run-up to the general elections of August 2022. Discursive practices and linguistic tactics are employed in discourses to achieve a particular political, social, psychological or linguistic goal. Critical theories of language see the use of language as a form of social practice. Critical discourse analysis claims that major social and political processes and movements have a partly linguistic and partly social and political character. Social relations of power are linguistic and discursive in nature. They are exercised and negotiated in discourse. The study utilised Mitchel Foucault’s approaches to political discourse and Norman Fairclough’s critical approaches to discourse analysis. Fairclough’s three-dimensional model of critical discourse analysis was employed in the study. First is the analysis of text; words are a part of the community, and texts contain interpretation. Secondly, language is viewed as a discursive practice, which is the production or the constitution of text and, finally, the analysis of language as a social practice, which includes the analysis of norms. The study sought to contribute to studies dealing with the discursive construction of power and ideology in political discourses. The study demonstrates that Kenyans do not vote independently; rather, they are persuaded to vote through the power exerted by the rhetoric of the politicians and the professional media practices that assist their presentation.

As language is central to all social processes and practices, so it is considered as the most effective tool for (re)shaping and (re)constructing the social realities and political identities as they are negotiated, (re)constructed and thus projected in the broader social and cultural contexts. Since the advent of new media technologies, particularly social media, the forms and modes of political identity construction and (re)presentations are also transformed. As debated earlier that language enables its users, specifically political actors, to exhibit the political ideologies and identities effectively, so the political actors frequently exploit these platforms to achieve their pre-defined political agendas. Within the same context the political rhetoric, specifically the ones that is generated and exhibited on social media network sites, offers a new visibility for the researchers to explore and predict how ideologies and perceptions can be achieved, advocated, altered and rebuilt through discursive discourse strategies on these networking sites. Providing the power of social media for political participation, political engagement and political activism, there is a need to design such framework that can offer a different lens for the analysis of critical yet sensitive issue of political identity (re)presentation beyond the textual level. To address the above debated issue a new theoretical framework is presented in this paper that enables to analyse the text with special reference to the context in which the political identities are negotiated, (re)constructed and (re)presented. This framework is designed by collaborating the approaches of CDA, Political Identity theory, Social Media theory and Political Discourse theory that enables to explore the interrelationship between the “language in use” and the context in which it is created and consumed.

Drawing on recent Political Discourse Analysis (PDA) approaches that map text over relevant context as supported by Van Dijk (2006), in this research, it was tried to follow this research route. The main intention was to look at political discourse via the lenses of PDA to see whether ideologies and power relations of interlocutors in the target setting of this study could have possibly been aligned with linguistic elements-here rhetorical devices and to see to what extent such text-context mapping is recognized as relevant to language tools within the selected datasets. Accordingly, the researcher tried to follow a sample of political talk- live 2008 US presidential debates- among two Republic vs. Democratic campaigns. To do so, some political strategies for argumentation including Van Dijk’s model representing 'Authority', 'Topos or burden', 'Future Representations’, ‘Comparison', 'Consensus', 'Counterfactuals', 'populism’, 'generalizations', and 'number Games' were mapped over some linguistic rhetorical devices such as ‘metaphor’, ‘hyperbole’, ‘irony’, ‘euphemism’, etc. The common discoursal moves in Obama’s vs. McCain's speech statements were compared and contrasted among similar strategies to find any emergent rhetorical devices. Findings indicated that 1) the political candidates had made use of rhetorical and political moves in tandem within the same propositional units, 2) some employed discourse devices were paralleled with the majority of political strategies like repetition and metaphor, and 3) some political strategies had been used to excess like 'comparison’, 'populism' and 'future representation’ respectively.

From its colonial history, twin-island state of Trinidad and Tobago inherited a uniquely diverse population of 1.3 million, including descendants of East Indians, Africans, Chinese, Syrians and Lebanese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and British, among others. The legacy of British divide et impera, paired with perceived ethnic diversity, has been marking and re-producing a deep Us vs. Them division, especially between two major ethnic groups of East Indians (35.4%) and Africans (34.2%). For over forty years, two ethnic groups have been struggling for political control through census counts and voting along ethnic lines. Although elections in country have always served as the critical arbiter in adjudicating rival claims by main ethno-cultural communities for power and privilege (Premdas 2004: 19), 2010 General Election seemed to have marked a turning point in history of nation. On May 24th, Trinidad and Tobago elected Kamla Persad-Bissessar, its first female Prime Minister and only second person of East Indian origin to hold PM office in 48 years of independence. Breaking out of country's rigid bipolar political mould, Persad-Bissessar won as leader of People's Partnership, a new coalition party that comprised both East Indian and African political forces and movements. She defeated Patrick Manning's People's National Movement and succeeded in winning 29 seats out of 41 in House of Representatives. Taking this unprecedented political success as its starting point, this dissertation explores discursive and political strategies behind Persad-Bissessar's election, analyzing a large corpus of textual and visual data from People's Partnership campaign. The starting assumption is that Persad-Bissessar broadened her electorate not only by presenting a carefully engineered coalition party but also by discursively positing a new, inclusive identity space throughout campaign and advocating a politics of inter-ethnic harmony in country. Therefore, I set to analyze how Persad-Bissessar engaged in a multi-levelled discursive construction of identities, defining her role as first woman PM candidate in history of country, legitimizing her coalition solution to political tribalisms, as well as fostering a wider national sense of belonging. As political communication has increasingly grown beyond realm of verbal language, understanding Persad-Bissessar's political meaning-making required both analysis of her election speeches as well as study of a number of multimodal texts, such as video and printed ads as well as official portraits, which played a crucial role in political advertising of her coalition. Within a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, I will combine 'Discourse-Historical Approach' (Wodak and Meyer 2009) for analysis of Persad-Bissessar's textual data and Kress and van Leeuwen's (1996) 'Visual Grammar' for analysis of visual data. Although English-speaking Caribbean is home to largest set of continuing democracies among postcolonial countries around globe, political discourse from archipelago is yet to receive adequate scholarly attention. The analysis of political discourse in Trinidad and Tobago has potential to shed light on complexities, struggles and contradictions of postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago by integrating knowledge about historical sources and social and political environment within which discourse as social practice is embedded. Starting from analysis of political discourse, this work aims at offering a new, discursive perspective on ethnicity, identity and power in Trinidad and Tobago as well as increasing scholarly awareness for development of a critical interpretative stance for political texts and talks beyond Euro-American zone.

The current study falls in the area of Critical Discourse Analysis. It has been further classified in Metaphors Analysis of Political Discourse. The main objectives of the study are to identify metaphoric construction in Pakistani Political Discourse and to explore the ideology, identity, power and hegemony employed by the Politicians through metaphors construction in the speeches. The study addresses the leading research question: How politicians employ the ideology, identity, power and hegemony through metaphors construction in their speeches? The research is qualitative in nature because it involves the corpora of political speeches as research instruments to collect the data. Corpus driven methodology has been used for critical discourse analysis of metaphoric construction. The sample has been selected from the electronic media. Thirty speeches of selected Pakistani political party leaders were selected as sample of the study. Purposive sampling technique was used to draw the sample. The sample was further classified as Pakistan Tehrik e Insaf, Pakistan Muslim League and Pakistan People’s Party. Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA), Fairclough Nine Properties Model and Gee’s Seven Building Tasks Model were used to analyze the text. The analysis reflected that all the party representatives presented their ideology and identity in their speeches by constructing metaphors based on different domains, culture and social practices and all the representatives of the political parties constructed metaphors with the aggressive tone and intention to exercise power and hegemony on the opponent party. The study can be useful for Political influence and propaganda through metaphors.

The present chapter proposes to build bridges between political discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. We intend to bring to light methodological benefits arising from the synergy of (political) discourse analysis and corpus linguistics, pointing to fruitful contribution from French text statistics. Taking the discourses of Nicolas Sarkozy as an example, we show how political discourse analysis can benefit from a reflection on corpora (their constitution, their role in the research process); on linguistic analysis and processing methods (particularly the computer-assisted methods of text statistics); and finally on the interpretative paths at a time of establishment of a numerical hermeneutics.

The purpose of the research is to identify the discursive and pragmatic reasons for linguistic creativity in political media discourse. The author of the article defines the types of linguistic creativity in the political discourse of English media, reveals the influence of both pragmatic factors and modern English communication on the emergence of linguocreatems. The scientific novelty of the research is related to the desire to determine the linguistic creativity usage patterns in the political discourse of English media. The results of the research show that the reasons for linguistic creativity in the political media discourse are due to linguistic, communicative, socio-political factors.

The article analyzes the verb representation of information sources in the political media discourse of the Chinese language, dedicated to the implementation of the Chinese foreign policy strategy One Belt, One Road (OBOR). The purpose of the article is to reveal the peculiarities of the verb representation of information sources in the OBOR Chinese political media discourse. Methods of discourse analysis, componential analysis, structural-semantic, descriptive, interpretive methods, as well as continuous sampling method were used to implement the objectives. The main material for the study was articles united by the “OBOR” topic presented on the pages of the online platform of The Zhenmin Zhibao 人民日报 - The Zhenmin Wang 人民网. The first stage of the study is related to the identification of information sources characteristic of the Chinese media discourse, and covering the topic of OBOR. The second stage of the study was the sampling of examples of verb combinations that represent sources of information within the meaning of indirect evidentiality ‘quotative’ and full citation. The third stage of the research was the identification of the verbs with which Chinese publicists formalize sources of information of indirect evidentiality. As a result, the study showed that the main sources of information in Chinese media texts can be divided into several groups: (1) persons (politicians and representatives of various organizations); (2) organizations (financial and trade, mass media); (3) documents (research results and statistics). The study showed that the OBOR Chinese media discourse is dominated by the references to the source of information related to the first group - persons (politicians, representatives of various organizations). Speeches of Chinese government officials and public agents play a significant role in the information support of the OBOR media discourse. Their representation in the text is carried out mainly by means of verbs of speech and mental activity. It is concluded that statements with the evidentiality meaning of ‘quotative’ is the most common way of presenting information in the OBOR Chinese-language discourse.

The article is devoted the study of methods and techniques of invective language transformation in political discourse. The paper describes psychological and linguistic approaches to the analysis of profanity. The article deals with the verbal features of invective vocabulary in modern political discourse. This study, based on the material of the American, British and Russian political discourse of recent years and allows us to draw conclusions about some of the features in the modern political discourse. The following research methods are used: functional and semantic analysis, contextual analysis, elements of discourse and component analysis, general scientific conceptual modeling, descriptive (observation, interpretation and generalization) and comparative method. It is established that invective vocabulary is used as a means of speech aggression and of establishment of successful interpersonal interaction in situations of contactless communication, where it can express negative and positive emotions and assessments. Invective vocabulary has a number of functional and pragmatic features that should be considered in intercultural communication and translation theory. The sphere of realizing of obscene language in English linguoculture is wider than in Russian, which is revealed in the high tolerance and degree of tolerance to its use, including in political discourse.

Pragmatic markers comprise a functional class of linguistic items that do not typically change the propositional meaning of an utterance but are essential for the organization and structuring of discourse, for marking the speaker’s attitudes to the proposition being expressed as well as for facilitating processes of pragmatic inferences. Pragmatic marker research has been characterised by descriptive approaches: even case studies that take their data from political discourse tend to focus on linguistic patterns of co-occurrence and sequentiality rather than social-institutional norms or broader societal concerns. The novelty of this article is, therefore, in linking pragmatic marker research, a primarily discourse analytical, language-oriented field to the broader field of Discourse Studies with a focus on manipulative social practices and their manifestations in discursive strategies. This article analyses evidential markers, general extenders, quotation markers and markers of (un)certainty1 in political interviews broadcasted by the BBC, CNN and Hungarian ATV. After a short overview of the formal and functional characteristics of pragmatic markers and their relevance to Discourse Studies in general and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) research in particular, characteristics of the political interview as political discourse, institutional discourse and media(tised) discourse are discussed. In the second part, the results of previous (primarily descriptive and genre analytical) research are reconsidered from the perspective of CDA and particular pragmatic markers are associated with manifestations of manipulative intent, such as suppression, polarization, recontextualising, conversationalisation and intended ambiguity. An important finding of this study is that a single pragmatic marker can serve several manipulative functions, while a given manipulative strategy is potentially realized by a variety of pragmatic items. Potential manipulative uses are exemplified with a view to applying the heuristic to the analysis of representations of particular political events and happenings, which is a direction for further research.

Politics and political discourse are closely related to people’s daily life, and this study aims to propose a new approach to political discourse analysis by combining English and Chinese corpora. By exploring the composition of formal language and the grammar generation process, this paper proposes an improved N-gram algorithm to address the shortcomings of the N-gram model in dealing with low-frequency words with low accuracy and uses the strategy of introducing alternative words to alleviate the problem of sparse data. Then, a critical metaphor analysis of political discourse in the English-Chinese corpus is conducted based on the improved statistical language model, and the convergence of political discourse is studied in terms of space and time. By analyzing the political discourse of American presidents, the spatial centrality factors of “we” and “our nation” were accurately extracted, and their correlations were 0.83, 0.73, 0.68, 0.51, 0.76, and 0.41 in order. The correlations of the unqualified facsimile noun phrases in the temporal convergence of political discourse reached 0.28, 0.25, 0.72, 0.68, and 0.54, respectively, and the accuracy of the improved N-gram model improved by about 28.1% compared with the traditional method, making using statistical linguistic models for political discourse analysis feasible and applicable.