English Media Discourse Research Articles

Boom or Bust: Unveiling the Media Portrayal of Confucius Institutes in America and Britain

Intercultural communication institutes, such as the Goethe Institut and Confucius Institute, were established to globally promote language and culture. However, the status of Confucius Institutes (CIs), particularly those in the UK and US, has shifted. In light of these evolving perspectives, this research employed Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar as theoretical frameworks in examining the diachronic transformations in the portrayal of CIs in American and British media discourse spanning the last decade. By analyzing intertextuality and linguistic elements, such as lexical choices and the usage of modal verbs, this study discerns different images of CI constructed by the media. Before 2020, the media highlighted the cultural elements of CI.

Linguistic analysis of gender stereotypes in the language of mass media

The aim of the research is a detailed analysis of language structures that spread and reproduce gender stereotypes in the field of mass media. The study employed the methods of analysis of language means of gender-oriented text, linguistic analysis of gender markers, comparative analysis for studying gendered vocabulary. Standard statistical methods and Cronbach’s alpha were also used. The use of linguistic means of gender-oriented text in English media discourse can vary depending on different factors such as genre, format, and target audience. For example, gender stereotypes are often used more frequently in news articles than in literary texts. This tendency is determined by the fact that news usually focus on specific events or problems, rather than on the persons involved. In the context of the media, gender stereotypes caused by an attempt to attach events a clear context and explanation, which can lead to greater use of gender distinctions. In contrast, the authors of fiction texts use more creativity and the opportunity to avoid stereotypes regarding gender roles. Further research may cover various aspects of gender equality, in particular, representation of different gender identities and the interaction between them in the linguistic space.

A Comparative Study of China's Ecological Image Constructed by Chinese and British Media Discourse on the Belt and Road Initiative in 2023 Based on Transitivity System

The paper adopts a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to compare China’s ecological image constructed in the Belt and Road Initiative Reports in 2023 between China Daily and Reuters. It finds that China Daily's news reports on the Belt and Road involve material processes (59.8%)> verbal processes (19.5%) >mental processes (12.6%)>relational processes (6.6%)> existential processes (1.5%). Reuters’ news reports on the Belt and Road involve material processes (52.1%)>verbal processes (26.1%)>relational processes (16.1%), existential processes (3.8%)>mental processes (1.9%). The use of transitivity in the China Daily constructs an ecological image that is committed to rejecting political struggles, and pursuing peaceful and green development. In contrast, Reuters’s use of transitivity constructs an ecological image that pursues green development, but with an arrogant posture. The reason for the difference is that China Daily is influenced by the Chinese government’s ideology and political aims, while Reuters is influenced by Western values and strategic considerations of China's threat.

Linguistic creativity in British media discourse

Relevance. The relevance of this work is due to the need to study the different manifestations of linguistic creativity in contemporary British media discourse, as it serves as a benchmark for the preparation of journalistic materials worldwide. This is driven by the desire to create universal models used to maximise the readership's attention. Purpose. This article aims to investigate linguistic creativity in the English-language press, assessing the linguistic potential of phonetic, lexical-semantic, morphological, word-formation, and stylistic means. Methodology. The methodology involves theoretical comprehension of the works of modern linguists, comparative research of linguistic creativity aspects, and structural, linguistic, and contextual analysis in the study of occasional lexemes in British media discourse. Results. This article evaluates the linguistic potential of certain linguistic units in modern English-language newspapers. It provides examples of occasional use of lexical-semantic, word-formation, and stylistic transformations in various content types. It also investigates partial and full telescopic, haplology units, and the reasons for the appearance of neologisms in media discourse. Conclusions. The materials presented in this work apply to the diagnosis of corpus data in the context of English-language media discourse. They are also suitable for assessing the limits of lexical-semantic transformations and the productivity of certain word-formation models used to create new lexemes. Additionally, they help form the culture of application and use of occasional vocabulary and neologisms in modern journalistic practice. Keywords: linguistics; English-language press; newspaper; word-formant

Manipulation of Politeness in English Media Discourse: A Pragma-stylistic Perspective

This study examines politeness in media discourse by using a pragmatic model to investigate complexities of language management. Drawing on various media texts analysis, the explicit research run focuses on the impact some stylistic decisions have on politeness perception and production. The study aims to fulfil the following objectives: The study seeks to explore the linguistic nuances, contextual determinants, and rhetorical devices which provide a full understanding of how media practitioners employ politeness strategically in communication, as a response to the question “How do cultural aspects relate to the stylistic manipulation of politeness in media discourse?” This study sets to provide invaluable comprehension on the dynamic correlation between language style and politeness in English discourse from the standpoint of pragmatics and style.

Verbal discrimination in modern English media discourse: linguistic aspect

Verbal discrimination in modern English media discourse: linguistic aspect

Land of Woke and Glory? The Conceptualisation and Framing of “Wokeness” in UK Media and Public Discourses

Though the term originated in the early twentieth century, it is only recently “wokeness” has become a staple of British media discourse. Typically, the concept features in commentaries and exchanges about institutional power, censorship, minority rights/representation, and structural racism, i.e. “culture wars” discourses. Polling suggests that the public considers wokeness a threat despite lacking clarity or consensus on its specific meaning. This study addresses this ambiguity, combining an analysis of coverage in the UK press with posts on Twitter and a questionnaire, asking UK respondents to define and exemplify wokeness. All samples revealed a multi-faceted concept observed at individual, group, cultural and corporate levels. A range of positive and negative framings were found, e.g. awareness and compassion vs. weakness and puritanism. Broader narratives constructed around wokeness include aspirational traits, moral posturing, a modern secular religion, and an insurgent “woke agenda.” These offer insights into how the concept is characterised and operationalised.

Translating tai chi and transforming qigong in British media culture

There are a growing number of studies of the history and spread of taijiquan and qigong. However, there are few studies of taiji or qigong in the media. Based on a study of British media archives, this article traces the construction and representation of taijiquan (‘tai chi’) in British media. In doing so, it establishes and evaluates the meanings and values that have been imputed to the practice in British media discourse. It first examines key representations of tai chi before the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, but proposes that the pandemic changed its status. It argues that popular understandings of COVID-19 as a respiratory infection led to an upsurge of interest in ‘breath-focused’ practices. In this context, taiji could have stood to gain in popularity. However, the article suggests that the difficulties of learning taiji – especially during a time of social isolation – meant that it was not taiji but the related and hitherto lesser-known practice of qigong that saw an increase in popularity. It concludes with a reflection on ‘authenticity’ and the status of some new translation-constructions of hybrid taiji-qigong practices.

Interpretability of English medical discourse into Lubukusu

In this era of massive travel and inevitable migration, many doctors encounter patients with whom they do not share a common language. Whenever doctors encounter patients with whom they have no common language, interpretation is the most solicited solution. This paper examines the interpretability of English - Lubukusu medical discourse in Bungoma County in Kenya. English has unique scientific jargon used in the medical field which have no equivalents in Lubukusu. This study sought to establish the degree to which such terminologies are interpretable from English into Lubukusu in medical consultations. The consultants for the study were two non-native doctors at each of the six selected hospitals in Bungoma County in Kenya, their interpreters and six Standardized Patients (nurses) working at the health facilities and six real patients. The researcher audio recorded two consultation sessions for every doctor with one patient or SP on different appointments and analyzed the data majorly by qualitative methods. The results of this study reveal that there are English medical terms that have no equivalents in Lubukusu hence are non-interpretable. The results suggest ways that can be utilized by governments in ensuring that their citizens benefit most from the presence of the doctors from other countries in their hospitals.

English media discourse of the early 21st Century: Lexical innovations

The emergence of a new kind of discourse on the world stage called media discourse or media discourse produces the trends of globalization and the development of communication technologies in the world. The article deals with the phenomenon of English-language media discourse as a relatively new linguistic phenomenon. The aim of this research work is a thorough analysis of the concept of English-language media discourse, reflecting the dynamics of modern language and identifying the features of lexical innovations in English-language media discourse. The comparative analysis method, typological method, method of component analysis, and descriptive method of research were used to study the issue of English-language media discourse. Using the comparative analysis method, the saturation of linguistic innovations and their prevalence were determined. Using the typological method, the common qualities of English and Ukrainian in the projection on their variety of linguistic characteristics were established. The method of component analysis helped in the study of the content part of the newly formed linguistic units. Using the descriptive method, the modern state of English-language media discourse was characterized. As a result of the scientific research trends of modern English-language media discourse in content and form have been studied and analyzed, as well as changes in the potential of modern linguistic means through the mechanism of new word formation, which is a prospect for further scientific research in this direction.

For the Pragmatic and Semantic Understanding of Lexeme "War" in English Media Discourse

The semantic perception of the lexeme "war" and its pragmatic understanding is a very interesting process from the linguistic perspectives. The recent negative situation in the world has especially strengthened the semantic perception of the socio-political event (war) and its pragmatic understanding in the linguistic context, which is revealed by our mini-observation and study. Accordingly, the main goal of our research is the pragmatic and semantic understanding of the lexeme "war" and the media discourse (British and American modern newspapers magazines, such as The Guardian, USA Today, BBC News. etc.) is selected as the principal analytical source for our study.

Linguo-cultural representation of the image characteristics of the British royal family members (based on the British mass media discourse)

The article presents the linguocultural image of the royal family and its representation in media texts. The linguistic and cultural image is defined as a set of stereotyped features that are positively assessed by the target audience and have deep national and cultural connotations. The analysis of the modern English media discourse, carried out within the framework of the article, made it possible to identify the main linguocultural attitudes forming the basis of the British royal family image. We describe the following integral characteristics of the image representation of the persons belonging to the royal family: nepotism and love of children, skepticism towards everything new and foreign, orientation towards the queen as a symbolic and valuable core of the royal family, their pride in the great historical past while simultaneously feeling the burden of imperialism. The article notes that members of the royal family are making attempts to modernize their own image characteristics in order to adapt them to the linguocultural realities of the modern epoch.

Semantic Derivation of Toponyms in the English Media Discourse (Based on the Articles of the Reuters News Agency in 2017–2018)

Within the framework of cognitive linguistics, questions of nomination are of particular importance. The article dwells upon functioning of toponyms in the English mass media discourse. The central question is the semantic derivation of the toponyms in English-language news of the Reuters news agency. This paper focuses on the main cognitive mechanisms of the formation of a new meaning, such as cognitive metaphor and metonymy, defocusing and profiling schemes. The article investigates the nature of the formation of new meanings and examines approaches proposed by Kubryakova E.S., Iriskhanova O.K., Boldyrev N.N., Babina L.V., Maslova Zh.N., Popova E.A., Ch. Fillmore, R. Lanecker, J. Lakoff. The data of the study consists of 57 examples of precedent toponyms Moscow, Russia, Ukraine, Kiev, Washington, roaches Hungary, Beijing, Britain, Georgia, Kremlin, Turkey, Venezuela that have rich semantics and great potential for the formation of new meanings. These toponyms are also used most frequently in the context of the current political agenda. The toponyms functioning in the English-language news of the Reuters news agency were analyzed for the cognitive mechanism that underlies the formation of the meaning. The findings show that the most productive mechanism of semantic derivation in media discourse is the mechanism of conceptual metonymy.

Nationally Orientated Communication as The Basic Function of Professional Activity in English Mass Media

This article aims to disclose the communicative essence of English media discourse and the specificity of the information transmitted, which is determined by both interrelated parties (i.e. media sources and readers) involved in this socially valid communicative process. English media discourse is examined in the British and American variants.The three parts of media communication comprising the author, the addressee, and the information itself are actualized in media discourse articles in a very peculiar form of their interconnection. The media orientation towards the addressee, i.e. the British and American public, leads to the articles being not only linguistically adapted, but also thematically focused on information which is habitual and even desirable for each of the said communities. The author often acts as a moderator who stays, figuratively speaking, behind the scenes, and merely regulates or verbalizes the information communicated by various representatives of the nations regarded as his or her full-fledged co-authors. The article also considers the gender aspect of media communications where male and female issues bear their respective linguistic and thematic features. The emotional colouring of the transmitted information turns out to be another specific point of the English media discourse that appeals to the British and American public through the use of certain linguistic means. The authors conclude that from the national identity-related perspective English media communication may be characterized as an information field that incorporates issues of importance for both nations, renders them with the help of nationally adapted wording, and thus even forms a kind of “energy space.”

Ecological reflection and its verbalization in the Russian, English and French media discourse space: a comparative approach

The article covers the problem of ecological reflection and the ways of its linguistic realization in the Russian and foreign media discourse space at the present epoch of digitalization and sustainable development. The main goal of this research is to characterize the key linguistic ways of expressing ecological reflection at its individual and collective levels of information perception by human consciousness in Russian, English and French media discourses. The study contains a comparative approach towards the analysis of the language units that express ecological reflection in the media discourses of different language domains. This method helps define the relevance of the study, which is primarily explained by the increasing number of interactive media materials focused on the environmental issues of the third millennium. The results of the study demonstrate a different degree of the language expression of ecological reflection (evolutionary, mediative and radical) by means of a particular choice of linguistic instruments specific for a certain language media space. In the end, one common principle is identified in the expression of ecological reflection in the Russian, French and English media discourse space. Despite almost opposite linguistic approaches towards the implementation of ecological reflection in the Russian, English and French media, there is one common challenge that unites them all, and this is the survival of the planet as well as its further sustainable development. Thus, at this stage the language choice for the promotion of eco-reflective ideas becomes convergent for three media discourse space of Russia, France and the English-speaking world.

LEXICAL INNOVATIONS OF COVID-19 PERIOD: STRUCTURAL AND LINGUOPRAGMATIC ASPECTS

The aim of this article is to research the properties of lexical innovations emerged during 2020–2021, the years of the global pandemic COVID-19, and the aspects of meaning of new phenomena they nominate. The study is based on the procedural apparatus of structural and pragmatic linguistics. The data used are taken out from online versions of English quality and mass newspapers, magazines, online dictionaries (oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com, dictionary.cambridge.org, collinsdictionary.com, merriam-webster.com, urbandictionary.com, dictionary.com). The results characterise the frequency of word-formation morphological models, comprising word-composition, blending and shortening.
 The paper focuses on innovations with the lexical items "coronavirus", "Covid-19", "epidemic / pandemic", "quarantine", "Zoom" functioning as a structural component in a series of structurally similar lexical units. The frequency of this structural component is explained by newly coined items semantics, which is connected with the relevant referent accepted by the society and most adequately understood, as it conveys a specific content about the realities of life. The meaning of such a word-formation constituent is easily predicted on the basis of its semantic structure. The article singles out the specific features of using the analyzed lexical innovations to refer to referents of various spheres in the English media discourse of 2020-2021 are identified and investigated. The research proves that innovations in question function in the English media discourse to realize a number of strategies. In the studied research the role of the selected lexical innovations of Covid-19 period in the implementation of strategies for organizing Modern English media discourse were taken into consideration: informative-interpretative, evaluative and attention drawing.

STRUCTURAL AND NOMINATIVE FACTORS TO DETERMINE THE MEANING OF MEDICAL TERMS IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH

The article raises the issue of structural and semantic features of the term origin in modern English medical discourse. Characteristics of such a plan include a description of the internal form of units of medical terminology, their etymology and morphological structure which are supported by the human cognitive activity in the nominative act. In view of the inner form of the units under analysis, it appears that many names for the medical phenomena were coined on the basis of people’s names or surnames, functional needs, qualitative characteristics, body parts and other features. The most productive ways of term formation in contemporary English are morphological, syntactic and word formation. Considering the etymological roots of the medical terms, units with Latin roots refer to a part of the human body and sometimes to the names of the pathologies. Terms founded on the Greek root signify a pathology or a disease. In English medical terminology there dominate words with Greek word-forming elements, many of them are included in the nomenclature of medical Latin, but they can be traced to the Greek language. Prefixes and suffixes in the morphological pattern of medical terms play an important role in revealing their meaning. The most popular type of word combinations in English terminology is a two-component attributive phrase containing a nuclear element, mostly a noun in the nominative case and an attributive, defining element. On the whole, the meaning of medical terms is determined by the extralinguistic information reflected in the inner form of the lexemes and also by their structural peculiarities such as the origin and the semantic content of the constituent elements such as roots, affixes, words in compound clusters. The semantic method of term formation presupposes the transition of terms from other sciences, borrowing terms from other languages, terminologizing, metaphorical and metonymic transference.

The Image of Chelyabinsk in the 20th century British Media Discourse (1901-1950)

The paper studies the evolution of the image of Chelyabinsk in the 20th century British media discourse. The research proves relevant as it involves both linguistic and historical analyses; it aims at retrospective study of the evolution of the image of the foreign city in British media discourse over a large time span. A wide range of methods is employed in the study: comparative, diachronic, cognitive-matrix, cognitive-discursive methods, source study, and content analysis. The source of the data is a digitized archive of British historical media texts. The authors fixed nine variations of the city name. The frequency of modeling the image of Chelyabinsk is dissimilar: it is rather high at the beginning of the century, declines in the second decade, reaches its minimum in 1921-1930, and rises again in the subsequent decades, which is explained by the interest of the British media to industrialization and the events of World War II. Most of the newspapers and magazines that modelled the image of Chelyabinsk were published in the capitals and large industrial centres, which is explained by the peculiarities of British print media, a higher level of education of large cities residents, and Britains economic interests in Russia / the Soviet Union. The significant difference in the images of Chelyabinsk across the time is in their emotive load: negative images of the beginning of the century are contrasted to positive images generated in the latest time span.

Nationally Orientated Communication as the Basic Function of Professional Activity in English Mass Media

This article aims to disclose the communicative essence of the English media discourse and the specificity of transmitted information which is determined by both interrelated parties (i.e. the media sources and the readers) involved in this socially valid communicative process. The English media discourse is examined in the British and American variants.The three parts of media communication comprising the author, the addressee, and the information itself are actualized in media discourse articles in a very peculiar form of their interconnection. The media orientation towards the addressee, i.e. the British and American public, leads to the articles being not only linguistically adapted, but also thematically focused on the information which is habitual and even desirable for each of the said communities. The author often acts as a moderator who stays, figuratively speaking, behind the scene, and just regulates or verbalizes the information communicated by various representatives of the nations regarded as his/her full-fledged co-authors.The article also considers the gender aspect of media communication where male and female issues bear their respective linguistic and thematic features.The emotional colouring of the transmitted information turns out to be another specific point of the English media discourse that appeals to the British and American public through the use of certain linguistic means.The authors conclude that from the national identity-related perspective English media communication may be characterized as an information field that incorporates issues of importance for both nations, renders them with the help of nationally adapted wording, and thus even forms a sort of “energy space”.

Характерные черты концептосферы “culture” в дискурсе прессы Великобритании

The paper aims to identify the characteristic features of the conceptual sphere “culture” in the British media discourse. The article considers peculiarities of approaches to studying the conceptual sphere through a complex analysis of postulates of scientific paradigms. The scientific originality of the research lies in the fact that it develops an integrated algorithm of the conceptual sphere analysis in the context of the polyparadigmatic approach which gives a basis to identify the features of the conceptual sphere “culture” in the British media discourse. As a result, realization of the integrated algorithm of the analysis has allowed revealing the kernel conceptual features of the conceptual sphere “culture”, as well as its periphery.