Media Texts Research Articles

The Influence of Mountain Climate on Cultural Features and Their Reflection in Political Discourse

It examines how mountain climate conditions shape unique cultural characteristics and how these characteristics are reflected in political discourse. The study analyzes the linguistic and rhetorical tools used by politicians to address the identity, traditions, and social attitudes of mountain regions. A comparative analysis is conducted using political speeches, media texts, and official documents, highlighting common and specific traits across different cultures. The findings reveal how environmental conditions influence the formation of cultural values, which in turn are reflected in political rhetoric.

Queering Contemporary Comedy: FX's What We Do in the Shadows and the Mediation of Nonnormative Gender and Sexual Identities

Utilizing queer theory, a textual analysis of 50 episodes of the FX horror-comedy series What We Do in the Shadows (2019–) resulted in three overarching themes: (1) representation of different forms of queerness and open expression of character identities, (2) normalization of queer identity and resistance to homophobia, and (3) inclusivity of relational configuration beyond queer-based narratives. Findings demonstrate the series promotes a queer perspective in addition to outright support for nonheteronormative characters. This reading of its dialogic and visual text adds to the literature on the positive media treatment of LGBTQ+ communities and how popular media texts serve as conduits of resistance to normative heterosexuality. Research in this vein is especially cogent and relevant given increasing antitransgender and intersex legislation that marks the U.S. political environment in recent years.

Textual variations in social media text processing applications: challenges, solutions, and trends

Being an informal communication source, social media text is susceptible to several intentional and unintentional textual variations. These variations lead to various out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words, making social media text processing more challenging. This work analyses and discusses such challenges by providing a detailed overview of different sources of intentional and unintentional OOV words and associated challenges. We provide a detailed survey of pre-processing techniques, including traditional and application-specific methods proposed in the literature to handle intentional and unintentional textual variations, while highlighting their pros and cons. The paper analyses the implications of text normalization (standardization) in different social media text-processing applications. Moreover, the paper provides an overview of the recent challenges and trends in handling social media textual variations, and it is expected to provide a baseline for future research.

Exploring emotional patterns in social media through NLP models to unravel mental health insights.

This study aimed to develop an advanced ensemble approach for automated classification of mental health disorders in social media posts. The research question was: can an ensemble of fine-tuned transformer models (XLNet, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA) with Bayesian hyperparameter optimization improve the accuracy of mental health disorder classification in social media text. Three transformer models (XLNet, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA) were fine-tuned on a dataset of social media posts labelled with 15 distinct mental health disorders. Bayesian optimization was employed for hyperparameter tuning, optimizing learning rate, number of epochs, gradient accumulation steps, and weight decay. A voting ensemble approach was then implemented to combine the predictions of the individual models. The proposed voting ensemble achieved the highest accuracy of 0.780, outperforming the individual models: XLNet (0.767), RoBERTa (0.775), and ELECTRA (0.755). The proposed ensemble approach, integrating XLNet, RoBERTa, and ELECTRA with Bayesian hyperparameter optimization, demonstrated improved accuracy in classifying mental health disorders from social media posts. This method shows promise for enhancing digital mental health research and potentially aiding in early detection and intervention strategies. Future work should focus on expanding the dataset, exploring additional ensemble techniques, and investigating the model's performance across different social media platforms and languages.

Лексикограматичні засоби експлікації психоемоційних станів у сучасних українських медіатекстах воєнного періоду

The article comprehensively analyzes the lexical‑grammatical means of verbalizing psycho‑emotional states, elucidates their role in creating a negative emotogenic atmosphere of modern media discourse during the Russian‑Ukrainian war period. It was found that the linguistic means of expression for psycho‑emotional states should be analyzed within the close relationship of form and content. Lexical, phraseological, metaphorical units become maximally expressive in syntactic structures, and grammatical constructions acquire a bright pragmatic effect as a result of them being filled with emotional and evaluative vocabulary, synonymous series, phraseological units, tropes, etc. The most frequent and most expressive syntactic models are highlighted (monosyllabic impersonal sentences with the dative case in the function of the state bearer, two‑syllable personal sentences with the nominative subject case, two‑syllable with metaphorical or phraseological predicates and experiential in indirect cases), which strengthen the emotional and expressive background of the analyzed media texts due to the interaction of their syntactic semantics with the lexical meaning and morphological expression of the filler components, as well as the influence of context, intonation, and non‑linguistic factors.

РОЛЬ ВИКЛАДАЧА У ФОРМУВАННІ МЕДІАГРАМОТНОСТІ УЧАСНИКІВ ОСВІТНЬОГО ПРОЦЕСУ

The purpose of the article is to define the role of the teacher in the formation of media literacy of the participants of the educational process. The study analyses contemporary Ukrainian and foreign works of teachers and methodologists. To achieve this goal, the following theoretical research methods were chosen: literature analysis - systematic research and analysis of existing publications and studies; logical analysis and synthesis. The relevance of the study is due to the fact that the role of educators in the field of media education, the challenges and tasks they face when introducing media literacy into the curriculum, as well as the connection between the acquired media literacy skills in the university community and later professional needs, are not sufficiently covered in current scientific works. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that the article lists in detail the main tasks of the teacher when introducing the basics of media literacy into the discipline. The paper also highlights the main obstacles for teachers to integrate media literacy into the educational process, including political conditions, the structure of educational sectors, Журнал крос-культурної освіти/ Journal of Cross-Cultural Education. № 4 2024 16 lack of experience, budget or resources, and lack of organisational commitment to this area. The analysis of the results suggests the importance of media literacy as an integral part of private and professional life, and thus the significant role of teachers in promoting this concept in formal education for children and young people, which is timely and important. The article also outlines the prospects for further research, including the identification and critical analysis of media literacy projects proposed by civic activists, educators and media experts in Ukraine and abroad, the development of methodological recommendations for teachers to introduce media literacy knowledge in foreign language classes, the selection and independent development of authentic teaching materials, and recommendations for practical activities in evaluating media texts and creating their own media products.

Reception of the political news narratives in readers’ responses: multimodality and intertextuality

Developed in the field of international relations, the theory of the strategic narrative (Miskimmon et al., 2013; 2017 among others) identifies it as a means for political actors to construct a shared meaning of international politics, and to shape the perceptions, beliefs, and behaviour of domestic and international actors. The authors of the theory maintain that the explanation of the workings of the strategic narrative presumes the study of its formation, projection, and reception. Such explanation brings together various scholarly fields aimed at the search of the lacking methodology that demonstrates how the formation, projection, and reception aspects of the strategic narrative work together as a triptych. The proposed article approaches this problem from the perspective of cognitive linguistics that studies conceptual grounds for verbally delivered information. The article forwards and tests a novel methodological framework, which posits a cognitive ontology of the information, featured verbally and visually, as the feasible grounds for tracking regularities in the simultaneous dynamics of the three narrative aspects. The article focuses on the projection / reception narrative aspects, represented in a media news text and the readers’ responses to it – the issue relevant for the linguistic field of intertextuality. Methodologically and thematically, the article continues the previous research (Zhabotynska & Velivchenko, 2019; Zhabotynska & Ryzhova, 2022; Chaban et al. 2023; Chaban et al. 2024 among others) of the formation / projection aspects of the strategic narrative featured in a news media text.

«Штурмы» Капитолия в немецких интернет-СМИ как пример конфликтного политического дискурса

The research aims to expand the boundaries of scientific knowledge in the field of understanding the problem of representation of acute political events by the media as a reflection of their author’s perception, which finds expression in linguistic consciousness and linguistic worldview. The article provides a political and linguistic analysis of the event “storming the Capitol” from the point of view of its presentation in the texts of German online media. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that politics in this work is considered as a speech activity, and the acute situation, which was the “storming of the Capitol”, is studied from the standpoint of its historical and linguistic representation, taking into account the ability of the language of the media to create the desired political interpretation of acute situations. This reflects the pragmatics of the media, capable of talking about similar political events in different ways, creating the prerequisites for the public perception of similar phenomena. The results obtained showed that the event of the “storming” of the Capitol, which took place on January 6, 2021, is described by German media using conflict-generating vocabulary, lexical units that reveal the manifestation and linguopragmatics of the conflict through the pragmatic potential of linguistic units that reflect the substantive side of classical conflict rhetoric, as well as the tactics of invective.

Attribution of Media Texts Based on a Trained Natural Language Model and Linguistic Assessment of Identification Quality

The creation of effective systems for filtering media texts is due to the need to develop artificial intelligence systems, which is a large language model that should be trained using “correct” text samples that do not contain signs of disinformation, infodemic and unreliability. The article presents the results of automatic detection of high-quality media texts, as well as text samples with infodemic features carried out using a trained natural language model based on a manually labeled corpus. Manual marking of the corpus was carried out by experts based on the parameterization of the text content. The goal of our work is to build a model of the language of media messages, assess the quality and identify detection errors caused by the linguistic characteristics of texts. Creating a model of the language of media messages is a condition for increasing the efficiency and quality of artificial intelligence systems. It has been established that the test use of a trained natural language model allows filtering media texts with fairly high accuracy. The support vector machine method proved to be most effective. The share of incorrectly recognized informative texts that meet the criteria of reliability and novelty is low and amounts to 6.2 percent. The percentage of incorrectly recognized uninformative texts is approximately 3.9 percent, which indicates a fairly high efficiency of the developed model. The errors in the detection of informative texts are associated with the use of proper names (anthroponyms, toponyms) and numerals in the headings. Linguistic features of misclassified texts containing signs of fake and misinformation comprise text samples using statements with speech verbs that are often used in informative texts.

The Sakha language: Cultural code of the nation in the media text of online newspaper editions

For the first time, based on online editions of the Yakut print media, an attempt has been made to re-think lexical symbols, idioms and parodies as powerful factors in understanding the unique cultural characteristics of the Sakha people from the perspective of linguoculturology. By looking through the prism of ethnic culture at the original linguistic means of Yakut online publications, we better understand their cognitive aspect and the figurative abstraction both of an individual and the entire people as a whole. In this study, the mechanism of forming our picture of the world depends on the information of modern media, its implementation being related to the property of these texts, and this is a key factor. An important result of the study is that in media texts, the words-symbols of the Sakha people’s original culture represent a non-equivalent vocabulary, their analogues are absent in other languages; moreover, Yakut phraseological expressions and proverbs help to avoid truisms and cliches, making the language of Sakha Internet publications more vivid and convincing. The identified Sakha language tools reflect the national identity of the ethnic group and connect people with their cultural and historical experience. In general, the specific lexical symbols, phraseological units and proverbs of the Yakut print online media reflect the worldview of the ethnic group, being a powerful factor in the formation of the national cultural code.

Precedent Phenomena as a Means of Event Representation in the English Language Media Discourse

Precedent phenomena act as a tool of informing and influencing the addressee in the media space. The aim of the article is to examine the functioning of precedent phenomena as a means of representing current events in media discourse. The relevance of the research is determined by the widespread use of precedent phenomena in mass media. Concepts of precedent phenomena represent a mental image of a stereotypical situation, which reflects the results of human cognition of the surrounding reality. In modern media texts, the peripheral layer is transformed under the influence of the extralinguistic context, while the nuclear layer of the conceptual component of the concept remains unchanged. The value and figurative (metaphorical) components of precedent phenomena related to associations at the diachronic level contribute to the expansion of the notional component of the concept when representing current events at the synchronic level. The article proposes an algorithm for the study of the verbalized concepts “fifth column”, “great game”, “iron curtain”, “cold war”, “road map”, “Pearl Harbor”, which, in the form of perception invariants, are included in the cognitive base of most linguistic and cultural communities. The sources of the research material were the texts of the quality English language press in the period of 2022-2023. To accomplish the task, the following methods are applied: discourse analysis, cognitive analysis, and diachronic analysis. The discourse analysis explicates the meaning of the precedent phenomenon at the synchronic level, taking into account nonlinguistic factors (political and socio-cultural context). Cognitive analysis defines the value component of the concept, which includes subjective modalities (axiological, emotive, deontic). An axiological modality is a rational (positive or negative) assessment of an event. Emotional evaluation is the result of a sensual reaction to a fragment of the world around. The deontic modality is connected with the normative worldview of the society that regulates the behavior of people in the community and the interaction of states in the global world. Diachronic analysis reveals the origin of the precedent phenomenon and defines its value and figurative (metaphorical) aspects, as well as the core layer of the concept. The proposed algorithm of analyzing verbalized concepts can be helpful for professionals in the field of cognitive linguistics, media linguistics, and political linguistics. The investigated precedent phenomena as dynamically evolving and transforming concepts may be of interest for further detailed study.

Media Presentation of English Borrowings of Pedagogical Discourse

Introduction. Currently, the Russian value picture of the world is changing under the influence of American culture as the leader of globalization. Borrowings in different types of discourse become an expression of these changes, the perception of which is formed in media discourse, playing an important role in understanding these borrowings. The purpose of the study is to investigate the features of the media representation of English borrowings of pedagogical discourse.Methodology and sources. The basis of the research was the collected thematic corpus of texts of different genres: texts of forums, articles of media educational platforms and media texts themselves with a total volume of 42 thousand words.Results and discussion. This article examines the features of the media presentation of the key imported concepts of pedagogical discourse “trend” and “rating”, which express the key idea of competitiveness for American culture. The borrowing “trend” is closely related to the contexts of the use of other borrowings included in its content structure: “know-how”, “startup”, “hackathon”, etc. and includes in its interpretative field the concepts of “innovation” and “modernization”, which receive an assessment depending on the subject of the assessment qualification. The interpretative field of the "rating" concept includes words such as “bullying”, “pressure”, “competition”. In most media texts, it is negatively assessed as contributing to a pragmatic approach to gaining knowledge, causing rivalry and negative emotions in children, causing psychological trauma and problems of relationships in the team. The basis for the metaphorical conceptualization of the processes taking place in education is the basic metaphor “man-nature”, as well as the metaphor of computer games and value, which allow us to highlight the value accents of perception and the attitude of society to the phenomena being mastered.Conclusion. It is revealed that the borrowings “trend” and “rating” have figurative and value characteristics, have pronounced evaluative labeling and metaphorical conceptualization. The study of borrowings of pedagogical discourse indicates the importance of the discursive factor in understanding concepts.

MEDIA RESPONSE TO IRAN'S ATTACK ON ISRAEL IN TEL AVIV: AN ANALYSIS OF WESTERN, MIDDLE EASTERN, AND INDONESIAN MEDIA TEXTS

ABSTRACTThis study aims to analyze media texts against the Iranian attack on Israel in Tel Aviv, using a discourse analysis approach that focuses on how texts are constructed and meaning is produced. In the context of the conflict involving Iran and Israel, the media plays an important role in shaping public opinion and narratives about the events. Through the media text analysis approach, the focus is on media responses from the West, the Middle East, and Indonesia. By examining the choice of words, the narratives used, as well as the emphasis in media coverage, we can understand how these stories are presented and interpreted in different regional and cultural contexts. In addition, this research will also explore how the discourse affects the public understanding of the conflict in the Middle East and influences government policies and public attitudes towards the event. The findings of this study are expected to provide insight into the role of the media in shaping social and political reality, as well as highlight the importance of criticism of narratives dominated by certain interests.Keywords: Iran Attack, Israel, Tel Aviv, Media Response

Malmö, Simrishamn, and Norrland: asymmetry in the categorization of place

Abstract Categorization plays a crucial role in organizing experiences, allowing us to make sense of the world. This process is reflected in the labels speakers use for geographical areas. This study investigates the categorization of geographical areas reflected in phrases including nouns for the three Swedish regions of Norrland, Svealand, or Götaland, and the conjunction och (‘and’). Using data from the Swedish Korp corpus (Borin et al. 2012), we examine how these regions and areas within them are represented in governmental, news, and social media texts. Results show that Svealand and Götaland are more commonly used with nouns for regions than Norrland. Norrland is used with phrases for more specific locations within the other regions (e.g. their towns and provinces) but also considerably larger areas (e.g. countries and continents) more commonly than the other regions, revealing asymmetry in how geographical areas in Sweden are categorized.

Tokenization of Political Texts in BERT Models Using ICF+ Ontologies

The design of machine learning language models, as well as their ensembles, used in complex analytics of news texts of domestic and Western electronic media is considered. An example of software implementation of a new language neural network model with problem-oriented ontological tokenization is given. The language used as tools is Python v.3.10, Anaconda v.2.1. The effectiveness of the approach in comparison with the best foreign analogues is confirmed by a series of experiments using the example of classifying news articles according to their ideological orientation into Western and English-language Russian ones.

Липкая инфляция, или языковая игра на материале словацких и российских экономических текстов

In modern linguistics, the understanding of language game refers to the field of speech communication, and the language games themselves are seen as a decoration of speech. Language gaming is multifarious. In this article we will focus on some forms of this phenomenon, manifested in the variation of words, their forms and meanings in Russian and Slovak economic media texts. In modern economic media texts, textual “expressivization” is observed, which is realized primarily with the help of the language games. Its evaluative function comes to the forefront – evaluativity is an integral category of media language. In our article we will focus on examples of language games in Slovak and Russian economic texts, which, in our opinion, contain this evaluation. Language gaming is a misuse of words or letters, a breach of logical correspondence, but, very importantly, it is an incorrectness that is realized by the author and deliberately allowed. Only a deliberate incorrectness will cause not annoyance and bewilderment, but a desire to support the game and try to uncover the author’s underlying intention.

Preparing Future Teachers for Media Literacy

This study addresses the question of developing media literacy, as one of the challenges of contemporary digitalised education. The results of the study are from a survey conducted in the academic year 2022–2023. The respondents were 119 undergraduate students enrolled from 2019 to 2022 in the Study Programme “Foreign Language: Two Foreign Languages” at L. N. Gumilyov Eurasian National University, Kazakhstan. The objectives of the study were (1) to identify the students’ level of preparation for working with digital media resources; (2) to determine the significance of differences between target groups; (3) to determine the significance of differences between male and female students; (4) to determine how a change in the curriculum impacts students’ media literacy. Quantitative research with an online survey in Google Forms software and qualitative research using content analysis of the curricula were conducted. The results of the survey show that first-year students, who enrolled in the Programme in 2022, have, to some degree, better media literacy skills than second-, third-, and fourth-year students. There is a significant difference between the four groups; there is no significant difference between male and female students concerning media literacy. Better media literacy skills may be an outcome of the knowledge provided in the new course, Analytical Reading of Media Texts, focusing on advancing students’ media literacy. The course was introduced in the Programme in the Autumn Term, 2022. Overall, the survey indicates that the student respondents have better digital skills in regard to using technology if compared to media literacy skills in evaluating information and checking its credibility.

Technological and Innovative Transformation in Marketing: Examination of Social Media Text Stream Visualization Concept with Bibliometric Analysis: Future Agenda

Changes in technology and innovation processes affect many areas. The impact of technology and innovative applications lead to radical changes in marketing strategies. Social media text stream visualization stands out as one of the most important tools of these changes. Social media text stream visualization allows the analysis of text data coming from social media platforms through graphics and infographics. In this way, social media text stream visualization allows the development of more effective and efficient strategies by combining technology and innovation in marketing. In this study, the Web of Science database is used to reveal in which areas the concept of social media text stream visualization has been used in the last 10 years through bibliometric analysis. After the inclusion and exclusion criteria are applied, the final sample consists of 12 refereed articles. Five separate analyses were conducted to test the sample. Performance analysis determined the publication years of the articles, their contributions by country, the outputs of relevant journals, and the sectors where this concept is used most intensively. The findings of the study provide a broad perspective on the research conducted to date and identify potential research gaps. Accordingly, it is seen that the studies within the scope of social media text stream visualization are mostly conducted in the fields of social media, advertising, ecommerce and market research. It was concluded that machine learning, big data, text analysis and time series methods were used in the studies. It is recommended that studies be conducted in the retail, tourism and accommodation and technology sectors for future research. This research aims to contribute to the field of marketing by revealing the gaps in the literature. The study also offers suggestions for future research to be conducted by academics and sectoral researchers.

Direct and Digital Democracy in the Ideology and Politics of the Five Star Movement

The article analyses the role of direct and e-democracy in the ideology and political practice of the Italian populist party Five Star Movement (M5S). Founded as a party in 2009, Movement stood out among European populists with its pronounced leftgreen agenda aimed at solving local problems of an urban nature. However, an even more remarkable feature of the Five Stars has become an equally clearly noticeable technoutopianism mixed with direct democracy, which argues for the need to expand democratic participation for ordinary citizens through the tools of direct democracy and digital technologies. Based on the study of primary sources (party documents, Beppe Grillo's blog and the official party blog), as well as text media materials, an attempt is made to trace how during two periods of activity of Five Star Movement in 2013–2022 the attitude of the party leaders to the role of direct and electronic democracy in the political activity of Five Stars gradually changed. The article analyses changes in Five Star Movement’s organisational structure and tools of the e-democracy in the course of the development of the party and its institutionalisation into the Italian party-political system. The article concludes that with the process of Five Stars’ incorporation into the political regime, the party has pushed technoutopianism out of its agenda and practice, strengthening party centralisation. Thus, innovative practices in the digitalisation of the political process did not lead to a real expansion of democratic participation, but were subordinated to a party discipline.

Manipulative Potential of Intertextual References in Business Discourse: Functional Analysis of Business Documents

Intertextuality has become a characteristic feature of postmodern texts, in which, in addition to updated information about contemporary or historical events, communicative and pragmatic guidelines are especially clearly visible. The effect is achieved by so-called linguistic and stylistic resources, which would be distinguished by the corresponding potential. Intertextual references are also actively used in business discourse (both oral and written). However, the field of business discourse has not been studied much from the point of view of the theory of intertextuality. By foreign and Russian scholars, intertextuality is mainly analyzed in relation to fiction texts and journalism (media texts). Nevertheless, the practice to use intertextual connections is rather frequent in the process of drafting, conducting negotiations, and conducting business correspondence pursuing the aim to manipulate business partners. Within the framework of this study, these specific aspects of intertextual references in various text types of business discourse as well as their function in the texts under study are highlighted and their manipulative potential is studied. Business documents functional analysis proved that in most cases intertexts were used to establish more credibility and engage partners in the business process as well as provide some guidance. Thus it proved our hypothesis that intertextual references in business documents can possess some manipulative potential.