Politics of force today is inseparably connected with politics of images. This paper focuses on the representation of the image of Russia in the British political mass media discourse of 2013-2017. Taking into account K. Boulding's definition of the image of state as a special concept, the paper claims that this concept includes the notion or nuclear, verbalized with the lexeme 'Russia' and its substitutes, and different associations, connected with this notion and thus forming: metaphorical, evaluative and ethnocultural associative layers of the concept. Drawing on the scientific works on problems of mass media discourse, image-formation, associations, structure and verbalization of concepts and using the methods of contextual, critical discourse, seme and conceptual metaphor analysis, the paper reveals the range of means for surfacing the nucleus and layers of the concept 'Russia, used by British journalists. These means demonstrate ideological values of the discourse in question and stereotypes, which it forms in the minds of British people. The paper suggests that the scheme of analysis of the image of state in the political mass media discourse, offered in it, can be applied to the investigation of images of other states as well as to comparative studies.
The paper considers political mass media discourse as a persuasive dialogue in which a journalist makes his interlocutors accept a certain point of view. The desired mental reaction on the part of interlocutors can only be achieved through careful choice of ways of persuasion and especially linguistic means often influencing effectively the emotional sphere. The persuasion can be subject to ideological aims thus representing a definite object as positive or negative. The paper claims that such object as the image of state can have opposite assessment in different periods of time and focuses on linguistic means of N. B. Boeva-Omelechko, et al.
The subject of this article are the linguistic means used to form the image-concept “Russia”. Corpus content analysis on the wide range material of the British print and electronic press for 2017-2019 is the base for constructing the nominative field with the core and near, far and final peripheries of image ”Russia”. The conceptual analysis revealed verbal means used for expansion of the concept volume and its component layers- metaphorical, nominative, evaluative and associative. These devices create the negative image-concept of state Russia in British public consciousness.
The images of states as special mental models are created in mass media discourse with its powerful persuasive capacity. The image of one and the same state can be different. This article focuses on the mechanisms of such a change of the image of New Russia in British mass media discourse on the basis of a comparative analysis of the linguistic ways of surfacing the nucleus of the concept “Russia” and its three basic layers - metaphorical, evaluative, and etnocultural associative - in the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union (1991-1993) and in the modern one (2013-2018). The relevance of this work is due to the growing interest of the British media in our country and the need to study the dynamics of verbalization of the conceptual, figurative, evaluative and associative components of the concept “Russia” in British media discourse over the past 30 years. The results of the study confirmed our hypothesis that two different images of New Russia were created in British political media discourse in the two periods: one in 1991-1993 after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other in 2013-2018 when British-Russian relations sharply escalated. In 1991, British journalists still used phrases such as former Soviet Union, Russian-Soviet state, Russian Empire to designate our state. Currently, there are such nominations as the Russian State, the Kremlin, Putin’s Russia. The metaphorical image of Russia has changed from a connotation associated with the concept of a weak, sick, newborn or defeated country to an offensive image of an enemy, a puppeteer, an active participant in military games, or aggressive animals, such as a bear, gorilla or octopus. The evaluative layer of the image-concept of Russia in the 1990s was represented by epithet utterances with some positive connotations associated with the hope of restoration and friendliness on her part. Currently, almost no positive connotations are found. The associative layer of the image-concept of Russia in the 1990s was represented in the British press by former superpower tokens opposing weak Russia to the powerful Soviet Union. Russia, as the successor to the USSR, was associated with the empire, with the green color of rebirth, with the East and mystery. However, objective journalists are sure that Russia is not an enemy, that cooperation between the two countries is mutually beneficial, given the positive historical experience of the interaction of the two great cultures. The analysis scheme proposed in the article can be used to study the transformation of images of other states. The article can be used in training courses for linguists, journalists and politicians.
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