Ukrainian Media Discourse Research Articles

Слова в нових соціальних реаліях: до питання про динаміку мовної картини світу

The paper deals with the study of nomination mechanisms in current usage of the units which denote social events. The material of the study embodies the texts of the Ukrainian media discourse (the period of the end of 20th –– the early 21th century). An object of the analysis in the paper is a point segment of the language world-image which is formed by the functioning and semantics of two lexemes ukr. zakhid «a measure, an official event» and ukr. aktsiia «a planned, public social occasion, an event».

Інноваційні процеси творення аксіологійних значень в українській лінгвокультурі: проєкція на антропоніми та їхні похід

Some changes connected with sociolinguistic factors, in particular, the Russian-Ukrainian war, that are taking place in the Ukrainian vocabulary are characterized. The trends of rethinking anthroponyms and their derivatives, which, thanks to the linguistic creativity of Ukrainians, are widespread in modern Ukrainian media discourse and recorded in dictionaries of new words and meanings, as carriers of evaluatively marked meanings and senses, are highlighted. The lexical structure of the Ukrainian language is being updated on the basis of the innovative word formation processes system.

The “Russian World” concept in the Ukrainian media discourse: some of the key narratives

The “Russian world” concept is constantly employed in political and media discourse. Despite its active use, no single comprehensive definition exists in scientific literature. In this study, a brief version of the “Russian world” term conceptualization was presented, including two categorical series of semantic formations (social groups and value systems) and three axiological conceptual functions of the “Russian world”. In addition, newly formed narratives in connection with the Russian-Ukrainian war encountered only within the framework of Ukrainian discourse were identified. As research material, Russian and Ukrainian-language texts from the Ukrainian media reflecting the consequences of Russia’s military actions on the territory of Ukraine through the prism of the “Russian world” concept were adopted. The work was conducted applying semantic analysis, contextual analysis, and the substitution method.

Agonal concepts and communicative strategies in European and Ukrainian media discourses after February, 24

The article is devoted to the issue of agonal concepts and strategic communications as a result of the full-scale invasion of the Russian Federation. Considering the ongoing war, it is considered necessary to investigate the Ukrainian and European media discourse and strategic communications as a system consisting of invariant and variable components that can be projected in mass media messages, as well as the transformation of such a system. The purpose of the research is to carry out a comprehensive analysis of agonal concepts and communication strategies in European and Ukrainian media discourse after February 2022. The research methodology is the following methods: content analysis method, discourse analysis method, critical discourse analysis method, historical analysis method, cross-method - cultural comparative analysis, and sociological method. This thematic study examines the agonal concepts and strategies of communication in European and Ukrainian media discourses after February 2022. It is investigated which strategies prevail in the Ukrainian and European media fields. The study shows how political leaders and the media use different levels of engagement, commentary, and content to demonstrate strength, unity, and stability during times of significant international tension. Attention was also drawn to how messages from the Russian Federation affect the international agenda. It is concluded that the strategic use of communication can become a powerful tool in the conditions of international crises.

Political toxicity in the contrastive perspective (Based on American, British and Ukrainian media discourse)

This research focuses on the issue of political toxicity in the media discourse of the United States of America, Great Britain and Ukraine. It defines common and distinctive features of semiotization of political toxicity in the media discourse. In political communication, toxicity is understood as a type of interaction between various participants in political discourse, which is characterized by a high degree of aggressive verbal, para- and/or non-verbal behavior and discriminates against the opponent based on race, ethnicity, gender, etc. resulting in such a politician (politicians) being perceived and then defined as toxic. Its purpose is to identify common and different ways and means of semiotization of political toxicity. It is based on methods of associative and identification experiments, computer multimodal analysis, as well as statistical processing of the information received. The study reveals the modes of the toxic effect deployment and the dictums of the politician’s toxic image formation in the their collective, associative-individual, symbolic, and media discourse-portrait. Complex analysis of a politician’s toxic image in different linguistic cultures takes into account the politicians’ behavior as opinion leaders and the coverage of the target audience, to which the effect of their toxic rhetoric extends: one person, a group of people, or the wider community. At the same time, the types of harm resulting from the visualization of the media toxic effect can be aimed at both the psychological states of the addressee and their gender, age, and professional characteristics. The paper determines means of verbal expression of toxicity both by the aggressive-emotional type of the politician and by the socio-cultural features of political struggle in the United States of America, Great Britain, and Ukraine.

National Identity in Media Discourses from Russia and Ukraine: Amid the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War

Summary This paper, based on the corpus of the news from TASS and UKRINFORM between February 24 and March 5, 2022, investigates different concerns of the two media platforms regarding conflict discourses, and analyzes their different naming strategies of social actors from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA). It is found that Russian and Ukrainian media attempted to construct different national identities for each other through distinct discourse strategies. The Russian TASS named Ukraine a security threat while including Donbas as Russia’s in-group member. It also utilized out-group discourse strategies to exclude western countries, such as the United States, from its friend circle. The Ukrainian media discourse from UKRINFORM, however, grouped Ukraine itself together with western countries allied with the United States while stigmatizing Russia and excluding the Donbas region. The current research shows that the politically driven principle is commonly used in the media discourses from TASS and UKRINFORM as the representative national media of the two countries.

Features of Constructing Representations Regarding Intractable Intergroup Conflicts in the Russian and Ukrainian Media Discourse

The phenomenon of intractable intergroup conflict is being actively studied in modern foreign psychology. The study of conflicts of this type is now becoming especially important due to the increase in their number in today’s reality. Of great importance are the works of the Israeli scientific school, which considers the phenomena of the ethos of the conflict, the collective memory of the conflict and the collective emotional orientation, which are the basis for interpreting information about the conflict situation. Despite the large number of models and approaches, there are still quite a few gaps in the research of intractable conflicts (for example, there is no generally accepted definition of an intractable conflict, and many research methods are poorly operationalized). The representations regarding an intractable conflict in the Russian and Ukrainian media discourse are analyzed. The ways of constructing such representations in the media discourse are considered through a reference to the socio-psychological infrastructure of the conflict. The main research method was critical discourse analysis in the interpretation of J. Potter and M. Weatherell. It was found that in both Russian and Ukrainian media discourse representations regarding the conflict were constructed through references to the ethos of the conflict: in particular, through the justification of group goals, the presentation of the opponent’s actions as illegitimate and unfair, the victimization of opposition groups, and the maintenance of positive image of the group. It was revealed that in both Russian and Ukrainian media there are references to collective memory, but the frequency of their occurrence does not allow to talk about a trend. The results can be used to develop measures to reduce bias in media coverage of conflicts. The prospects for further research are discussed, in particular, the analysis of intractable conflict representations in audiences of different media and their comparison with those repertoires that have been identified in the media discourse.

The impact of neologisms on the development of the modern Ukrainian media discourse of war

The following research aims to emphasize the significance of neologisms that emerge as a result of the war by the Russian Federation against Ukraine and their effect on the current Ukrainian media discourse. The purpose of the research is to identify the neologisms’ structure and semantics and explicate the reasons for their occurrence in the Ukrainian media discourse and vocabulary. Neologisms are created to name novel concepts or rename the already existing ones in different fields of life due to various changes caused by numerous factors. The methods used to analyze the corpus included linguistic analysis, linguo-cultural, word-forming analysis, and discourse analysis. The study concluded that neologisms were created to name people, countries, nations, as well as new concepts. Metonymy, metaphor and compounding were determined to be the most productive means of neologisms coinage in Ukrainian. Shortening, blending, misspellings, mishearings, mistranscriptions or mispronunciations turned out to be less productive in the Ukrainian language.

ГЕНДЕРНІ СТЕРЕОТИПИ УКРАЇНСЬКОЇ ЖІНОЧОЇ ЕЛІТИ В ПОРТРЕТНОМУ ІНТЕРВ’Ю

The article discusses gender stereotypes perpetuated in the language of the Ukrainian female elite during portrait interviews. It describes the general situation of present-day mass media influence on society including its specificity in gender diversity. Special attention focuses on defining and analyzing gender stereotypes in present-day Ukrainian society, particularly describing the features of stereotypical perception and self-identification of women in society. In the context of current political events in the Ukrainian society influence of feminism on Ukrainian media discourse is characterized. Gender stereotypes vividly depict and allow recognizing images of women leaders, homemakers, and driving forces behind social and political events in the communicative environment. The study provides differentiation between understandings of gender and sex, media discourse, and portrait interviews as a form of communication aimed at highlighting opinions, personal feelings, and issues of certain individuals in the Ukrainian society that influence public opinion. The article relies on the classification of stereotypes based on gender types pertaining to a certain sex, social roles and status, as well as professional affiliation. Showcasing an interview with the well-known Ukrainian actress, volunteer, and public figure Natalia Denysenko, conducted within the framework of the social project New Reality, stereotypes of femininity are identified and described. In the portrayal of the strong actress, stereotypes such as women being weak expressed through the use of metaphorical expressions, women being shy represented through the juxtaposition of openness and shyness, women being the guardians of the family articulated through lexicon of preservation and interaction of gender roles, dominance of the masculine gender presented through morphological incongruities in masculine grammatical forms, are actualized.

The languages of the national minorities of Transcarpathia in the Ukrainian media discourse during the war

The article analyzes the peculiarities of discussing the issue of languages of national mi­norities of Transcarpathia in Ukrainian online media between April 25, 2019 (after the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted the Law “On Ensuring the Functioning of Ukrai­nian as the State Language” in the second reading) and December 2022. It has been traced that in Ukraine, the level of interest in Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, and Polish languages during this period (according to Google Trends) was heterogeneous and in­creased significantly after the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Publications on the languages of national minorities in Transcarpathia mainly concern the Hungarian community (75 %), with only a tiny part covering the Romanian (3 %), Slovak and Roma (2 % each), and German (1 %). 17 % of publications cover the issues of several national communities simultaneously. “Karpatskyi Objektyv” and “Zakarpat- tya online” are the media that most often cover this issue. The analysis led to the con­clusion that before Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine, online media covered the pros­pects for the functioning of the Hungarian language in educational institutions in Transcarpathia most of all. However, after the beginning of Russia’s post-wide invasion, this issue was relegated to the background, and more attention was paid to the function­ing of the Russian language in Ukraine, the discussion of the law on national minorities, and the creation of new opportunities for learning Ukrainian, including for representa­tives of national minorities. Taking into account the observed content trends in media publications, it is suggested that the language issue has been a pretext for Hungary to obstruct Ukraine’s integration with NATO rather than a reason. Keywords: language of national minorities, Transcarpathia, media, Hungarian language, Ro­manian language, Slovak language, Ukrainian language.

PRECEDENT TITLES FROM MASS CULTURE TEXTS IN UKRAINIAN MEDIA DISCOURSE

The article analyzes the precedent units that are most fully realized in the Ukrainian media discourse, in particular in the headline complexes of the newspaper text, which are distinguished from mass culture texts by origin. Such headings are easily perceived and recognized by recipients. They don’t require in-depth interpretation. It has been proven that mass communication demonstrates such an interdiscursive level of interaction. On the one hand, newspaper discourse, on the other – a complete mass-media space. The main forms of representation of which are cinema, television, pop music, as well as directly newspaper and magazine discourse. The common information space enables the wide application and penetration of various elements of other types of discourses in the mass media space into the newspaper discourse and their large-scale nature. It is noted that the main group of titles is represented by the names of films and animated films and television series. First of all, they use altered titles of foreign films and quotes from well-known animated films for Ukrainian audience. Quotations have acquired a precedent status and a certain aphorism, so their use in newspaper discourse is justified. The second group of precedent headings is advertising discourse on political topics. Numerous political slogans and slogans of presidential, parliamentary and regional elections which were replicated through outdoor advertising that is widely used in newspaper articles, mostly in a transformed form. In such headlines the main component slogan is presented almost unchanged. Secondary component is a comment on the slogan. They mainly have a two-part structure: they consist of a nuclear component, which has a precedential character and an auxiliary one. The third group of precedent units of mass culture, which constitutes pop or show discourse including the names of television projects, programs, quotes from original songs and from films. Most of such quotes are presented in a transformed form exclusively at the lexical level, so the recipient easily establishes the pretext.

CITIZEN JOURNALISM IN UKRAINE AND GLOBALIZATION MEDIA PROCESSES DURING THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR

The scientific work considers citizen journalism as a modern phenomenon of the multimedia space of Ukraine, modern trends in the development of citizen journalism during the Russian-Ukrainian war. The study highlights the main features of this type of journalism, which is actively developing in social networks and other Internet platforms. The main ones include speed and mobility, ease of publication and submission of material, large audience coverage, immediate feedback and the possibility of live communication, crowdsourcing and diversity of viewpoints, activism and promotion. The object of the research is the modern Ukrainian media discourse during the war. Ukrainian news reports and analytics created by public journalists during the Russian-Ukrainian war served as material for the analysis. During the Russian-Ukrainian war, a citizen journalist becomes available to the general public of Ukraine, both amateur and professional. The blog has become a tool for the development and unstoppable growth of the influence of citizen journalism on the formation of public opinion, by providing information from the first sources, efficiency and mobility, ease of submitting material and its perception, a large audience of coverage and interactivity, crowdsourcing and diversity of points of view. The appearance of video materials and text messages of leading bloggers of Ukraine in the columns of world publications and in the TV programs of leading companies in the world indicates the rapid growth and strengthening of trust in this type of journalism. We see the prospects for further research in the analysis of new trends in the development of citizen journalism, the emergence of new features and even genres, convergence of formats of traditional mass media and social platform blogs.

"ЛІНГВІСТИКА МОДИ": ТРЕНДОВІ НАЦІОНАЛЬНО МАРКОВАНІ МЕТАФОРИ (НА МАТЕРІАЛІ МОВИ ГАЗЕТИ)

The socio-psycho-linguistic phenomenon of fashion draws considerable linguists’ attention: one can trace the methodological foundations of this phenomenon study being dynamically developed, the formation of a corresponding metalanguage, as well as the formation of research aspects and domains, which makes it possible to justify the emergence of "fashion linguistics" as a new linguistic direction. One of the tasks of "fashion linguistics" is the study of trendy metaphors in the media style as the most popular in today’s discursive space. The newspaper language is considered to be the source that attests to the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian language progress, demonstrates its development peculiarities, as well as its corresponding trend changes. In recent years, the journalistic style has changed, which is related to extralinguistic factors – democratization of society, Russia’s invasion, increasing the Ukrainian language prestige, Ukrainian culture and history presentation, etc. The newspaper images is based on a metaphor, which is skillfully modeled by speakers, realizing various formulas, including traditional and innovative, trendy ones. One can currently view the renewal of the Ukrainian metaphor fund, which generally expands the scope of national metaphors given the specificty of Ukrainians’ mentality, the precedent expressions manifestation, as well as precedent situations for the successful creation of a language game, original meanings modeling. In journalistic style texts, we fix the fashion for so-called phytonyms, created in accordance with the Ukrainian natural philosophy principles, such as: "pumpkin metaphor", "garlic metaphor", "bean metaphor". Thus, Ukrainian media discourse demonstrates a fashion for national, a fashion for language creativity, which is embodied in Ukrainian linguistic culture. The perspective of the research is in tracking and studying the so-called fashion trends in language, in particular fashionable metaphors, in the possibilities of creating a national fund of metaphors, as well as in paying attention to the development of the terminology of fashion linguistics.

Hate Speech in Ukrainian Media Discourse

The article deals with the problem of hate speech in the legal, cognitive, and linguistic fields and presents an analysis of the different views and interpretations of this problem in academia. The terms “hate speech" and “hostile language" are semantically delimited in the Ukrainian language as non-identical. Specific examples are given of the use of hate speech from the Ukrainian press and online media. The article proposes criteria for value judgments which do not represent hate speech. Statements about national and racial characteristics and identity are considered. The article proposes a specific algorithm for the implementation of linguistic expertise regarding the detection of hate speech.

Psycholinguistic aspects of representing aggression in wartime media discourse

The article focuses on aggression caused by the Russian-Ukrainian war as a vivid phenomenon in media discourse. The paper reveals the psychological aspects of this phenomenon, the reasons for the use of verbal aggression, its forms, and its impact on recipients. The research also explores lexical and stylistic means of representing aggression in the Ukrainian media discourse: online publications in periodicals and posts on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It has been identified that the frequently used invective vocabulary and creolized memes in the media are specific verbal and nonverbal means of psychological liberation from aggression and destructive influence on the target audience. Based on the results of a survey involving 100 respondents from different regions of Ukraine, 50 of whom were male and 50 female, it was found that aggression serves to expose such dominant negative emotions evoked by the Russian-Ukrainian war as anger and hatred. However, the object of aggression of the people surveyed is strikingly different: for 58 % of men it’s the Russian president, while for 52 % of women – the Russian troops. When asked about the most common forms of aggression, the majority of the respondents claimed that it is expressed by mockery, curses and obscenity. The survey documented the use of the corresponding war-related emotionally charged vocabulary, including neologisms with various word-building patterns and newly formed set phrases, by both females and males to express their aggression verbally. Additionally, the participants of the survey confirmed that creolized memes are effective functional tools with nearly equally distributed percentage of protesting against the war, ridiculing invaders and resisting the Russian propaganda.

CONTENT FILLING OF THE LEXICO-SEMANTIC GROUP “WARRIORS” IN THE DISCOURSE OF THE RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

The paper analyses the linguistic means used to denote the military of the Ukrainian army within the discourse of the Russia-Ukraine armed conflict. The military conflict that has been ongoing since 2014 has affected the linguistic picture of Ukrainian society. In the media space, a complex of linguistic means is formed, reflecting the armed and information confrontation. A special role is played by linguistic units that objectify the positive image of a warrior of his own army. The purpose of the paper is to model the structure of the lexical-semantic group “WARRIORS” in the discourse of the Russia-Ukraine information war. For this purpose, the texts of Ukrainian information portals and pages in social networks are analysed, as a result of which 90 lexemes and collocations to denote the military of the Ukrainian army are recorded. As a result of the analysis, the structure of the lexico-semantic group “WARRIORS” as a component of the “DEFENDER” microfield within the lexical-semantic field “WAR” is modelled. A semantic-cognitive analysis of the DEFENDER and WARRIOR concepts in the discourse of information war is carried out. The results of the analysis show that the linguistic designation of the defender in the modern Ukrainian media discourse coincides with the traditional picture of the world of speakers, according to which the warrior of his own army is endowed with exclusively positive qualities. Within the lexical-semantic group “WARRIORS” two types of microgroups are distinguished: for designations of general concepts and specialized designations – with approximately the same set of constituents – 46 and 44 units, respectively. In each of these types, 10 lexical-semantic microgroups are allocated. It is established that in the analysed media space both ready-made nominative units and morphological innovations are used to denote the defender. The use of paraphrases and metaphorical collocations is common. The influence of socially important events on the choice of language units for the designation of the military is also recorded.

Sexism in the advertising discourse of Ukraine

The article identifies the reasons for the use of sexist advertising in the Ukrainian media discourse and its impact on the formation of women's image and social well-being. Sexist advertising campaigns of Ukrainian organizations are analyzed.

The Phenomenon of Cognitive Scenario in Soviet Ukrainian and Modern Holiday Journalism

The article deals with considering scenario structures in the linguocognitive and linguopragmatic aspects. The scenario phenomenon is determined in connection with the concept of frame in cognitive linguistics. We call a scenario a kind of frame because it also contains information about the typical and standard, and we emphasize such a feature as dynamism, i.e. the deployment of this information over time. The research is based on two chronologically and essentially different segments of Ukrainian media discourse (Soviet and modern), and the thematically defined segment chosen for analysis is texts about holidays and written for holidays, which usually have a broad audience and potentially influence the formation of public opinion, fixing estimates in the picture of the world. Therefore, attention is paid to the functional measurement of the studied language units. In the studied material, there are verbalized scenarios of celebration as a type of social interaction - the course of events in time, with specific roles of participants in the process and with characteristic attributes. Usually, the detailed recording of scenarios in the text is not intended to convey information because they contain conventional knowledge but to reproduce the feelings and experiences that accompany them. This ability of scripts to exert emotional influence was actively used in Soviet letters, which was to form the necessary emotions and implant them. In addition, scenarios can be an independent evaluation unit or provoke an evaluation attitude towards them. Verbalized scripts are also sometimes used to create irony. We conclude that the script verbalization of social practices of celebration in the press is a productive means from a functional point of view of emotionality, evaluation, and creation of irony. Such contexts contain socio-cultural information and can therefore directly appeal to the readers’ picture of the world and influence it. Moreover, this influence can be ideologically neutral, as in many modern articles, where the intention of the publicist is often to reproduce emotions and feelings, and propagandist, as in Soviet texts, where traditional scenarios are filled with ideological components through implantation.

Metaphorical modeling of the concept of EUROPE in Ukrainian media discourse

The aim of the study was to analyze metaphorical models which objectify the concept of Europe in modern Ukrainian media. The relevance of this study is confirmed by the fact that in the last decade of the 20th century, the idea of “Europe” has taken on characteristics of a media-concept and a mental prototype of the future, which has taken a leading role in Ukrainian media discourse. The source of materials for this study became publications of “Ukrainian Youth”, “The Voice of Ukraine”, “Day”, “Mirror of the Week”, “Veche”, and others, which are presented in electronic corpuses of Ukrainian texts GRAK and MovaInfo (years 2012–2020). The total amount of analyzed lexical units is 101 (50 lexemes from the corpus MovaInfo and 51 lexemes from the corpus GRAK). The concept of Europe is a culturally-generalized, value-heavy entity, a deep, abstract category, which for a long time built its own multidimensional spheres of concepts. At the same time, the concept of Europe is a national, specific fragment of the nation’s worldview. Analysis of metaphorical models, which found their place in Ukrainian mass media, showed that systematic, multidimensional dismantling of the concept of Europe is happening gradually, which is leading to the loss of a stable, geographical definition of the referential space of the lexeme. As a result, this leads to correlating changes in its semantic structure. For the designation of the named concept, the following conceptual metaphors are predominantly used: fort, babushka, mentor, dream, spirit, supermarket, road, and others, predominantly with positive connotation. The inspected material displays that the past decade of the 20th century significantly gave relevance to the concept of Europe, declaring it as an important, modern ideologeme, like a mental prototype of Ukraine’s future. Comprehension of the concept of Europe as a myth is gradually turning into its realization as a major goal.

The Discursive Opposition and the “Power of Discourse” in the Ukrainian Mass Media

The subject of this publication is related to such directions of modern linguistics as critical discourse analysis, media linguistics, and text semantics. The article examines the features of the media discourse of Ukraine on the example of antonymic semantic relations that are the result of modern discursive practice. The media discourse of modern Ukraine demonstrates the facts of the emergence and functioning of the pseudo-antonymic opposition. The research is based on economic topics articles published in Ukrainian online publications during 2019-2020. The texts of the publications are written in Ukrainian or Russian. All articles are devoted to the problem of “betrayal or victory”. The author of the article asserts that the active functioning of the Ukrainian lexemes “betrayal” and “victory” in the media discourse influenced not only the emergence of unusual oppositional relations between these lexemes. The active use of pseudo-antonyms in speech contributes to the destruction of traditional axiological values of Ukrainians and involves them in pseudo-discussions. Thus, first of all, the “power of discourse” is manifested. The author speaks about the formation of an independent discourse “betrayal or victory” in the Ukrainian media discourse. Pseudo-antonyms explode the pragmatic intentions of the sender of the message and are a means of manipulative influence on the linguistic consciousness of the recipient.