Political Protest through the Prism of the British Press: Strategies for Managing the Perception of Journalistic Texts

Abstract

Introduction. The purpose of this paper is to identify similarities and differences in discursive strategies aimed at managing the perception of journalistic texts describing similar protest events in different countries.Materials and methods. The material for the pa­per includes articles from “The Economist” describ­ing protest events. Protests in August 2019 in Mos­cow and “yellow vest” protests in autumn – spring 2018 – 2019 in France were chosen as reference events. The methodological tools include the following general scientific methods: analysis, synthesis, sys­temic and functional approaches. Critical discourse analysis is used as a specific method. Discursive strat­egies form the subject of the research. The referential strategy includes an event-factual plan of the events being described. The connotative strategy works with emotionally expressive and evaluative vocabulary. The meta-discursive strategy chooses text frames and fills them with referential and evaluative components which together form the pragmatic functionality of the discourse..Research results. The research involves the fol­lowing stages. At the first stage the central frames of the articles on the basis of the titles and subtitles of the articles are identified. At the second stage the referential and evaluative components in the vocabu­lary of the frames are examined. At the third stage a comparative analysis of the meta-discursive strategies of the articles under research is carried out, which in­cludes comparing the pragmatic functionality of the headings, titles and subtitles of the articles; contrast­ing the articles in terms of the composition of frames and identifying what is common and specific in the content of the main frames of the articles. The results of the work show that such linguistic tools as selecting facts and events for the text, framing the content of the text, choosing language that produce an emotional-evaluative, suggestive and persuasive effect on read­ership, frequent occurrence of words that are fit for the goals of the text are used to manage text perceptionDiscussion and conclusion. Professionals in the fi of international relations, international law, political science, public administration must know the linguistic methods used to analyze journalistic and political texts and be able to identify language tools aimed to drive text perception in the target direction.