"Russian Aggression" American-Style and "Russian trace" Ukrainian-Style

Abstract

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the “Russian aggression” representation in the American mass-media and the “Russian trace” in the Ukrainian mass-media. The data of the subcorpus News on the Web (NOW Corpus) from the British National Corpus and the Ukrainian Internet mass-media serve as the material for the analysis. Corpus studies represent the combination of Information and Communication Technologies and the reflection of the linguistic situation. Another opportunity of using a language corpus is its application as a means of studying and interpreting the axiogenic situations. The mass-media, being represented in the national language corpora and in the Internet, transmit axiological prescriptions and priorities of the political communication actors, reflect the conceptual “friend-foe” opposition of the relevant type of discourse, cause the discourse destruction, the definition of which is given in the paper. The analysis of the linguistic and pragmatic characteristics of the “Russian aggression” and the “Russian trace” at a new round of information and psychological warfare proves the fact that the influence of the phenomena under study is quite strong and generates a backlash on the part of the Russian mass-media and online outlets. This reaction can be characterized as rebuttal and, on the contrary, as support with negative evaluation semantics. The conclusion is made that information and psychological warfare being unleashed in the mass-media is characterized by the transmission of the destructive narratives, psychological and speech influence on the target audience, disruption of the states’ relations. The situation is considered to be dangerous when journalism of facts is substituted by journalism of opinions and information and psychological warfare turns into information aggression.