The Artificial Intelligence Ideologeme in the Multimodal IT Marketing Discourse: A Corpus-Assisted Study

Abstract

The article focuses on investigating the specifics of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) ideologeme in the website discourse of software vendors. The material of the study is the website discourse of Microsoft. The linguo-conceptual and discursive analyses have resulted in identifying the most frequent lexemes in dictionary entries and constructing the nominative field of the AI concept. We have carried out a corpus-assisted study of the linguistic representation of the AI ideologeme in the Microsoft discourse using AntConc and extracted keywords and collocations, including metaphorical ones, which make the ideologeme explicit through keywords such as responsible, businesses, change, etc., collocations: AI-ready culture, AI-human partnership, etc., metaphors based on the actions of living beings such as drive, dive, etc. The keywords and collocations create the intention-driven positive ideologeme of AI as a phenomenon regulated by competent bodies and empowering businesses to drive the positive change, along with amplifying the capabilities of human beings. The nonverbal means of the AI ideologeme have been described within the representative and interactive dimensions such as pictures of living beings, colors of nature such as green and blue, and metaphorical perspectives contributing to the discursive affinity of AI and nature. The corpus-assisted study has resulted in identifying the discursive representation of the AI ideologeme which is different from that of the dictionary entries describing AI as a machine capability to copy the human behavior.