REPRESENTATION OF THE SCENARIO «CONFLICT IN THE BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY» IN THE BRITISH MASS-MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

The article focuses on the modeling scenario “Confrontation in the British Royal family” which is actualized in the British mass-media discourse through an interaction between such concepts as BRITISH ROYAL FAMILY (a culturally marked one), CONFLICT, and RELATIONSHIP, graphically visualized and presented as a complex structure of four parallel subsidiary scenarios (confrontation between Harry and William; confrontation between Harry and his father; confrontation between Harry and Camilla; confrontation between the Duke and Duchess of Sussex and the Royal family) that are realized in the slots of the propositional schemas of the action and thing frames. In order to single out verbalizers of the slots, a corpus of 25 articles about Prince Harry’s memoire book “Spare”, published in the period from January to April 2023 on the web-sites of the British periodicals “The Guardian”, “The Independent”, “Daily Express”, “Daily Record”, “The Sun”, was processed by AntConc programme and analyzed correspondingly. The analysis has allowed to identify the agents, patients, causes and the time frame of the conflict as well as to define the character of interaction between the concepts involved in the scenario. Modeling of the scenario “Confrontation in the British Royal family” on the basis of the British mass-media discourse has resulted in reconstructing the sequence of the dramatic events in the definite period of the British Royal family’s life, giving an insight into the perception of these events by the British society, distinguishing their verbal reflection in the British language community, and determining the role of the British media in shaping the Royal family’s image in the British minds.