2025
№ 3
(Vol. 12)
The article is devoted to the functional and semantic analysis of the words feik (fake), feikovii based on the media subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus, including newspaper, central and regional media, and social networks. The main and oral subcorpora were also reviewed. The analysis encompasses 1372 examples of the noun fake and 197 examples of the adjective fake. The publication reflects the process of ideologizing the semantics of these words and demonstrates their semantic syncretism, namely: the ratio of nomination and evaluation, rational and emotional; the relationship of subjectivity and qualitative characteristics in the structure of their meaning, which is related to the conditions of use. Using the example of the adjective fake, the phenomenon of combining the semantics of relativity and quality is also comprehended. The most frequent semantic and thematic groups associated with the adjective fake include: Internet and media resources, IT, and user technologies; socio-political subjects, financial, economic, and legal spheres; medical sphere and cultural artifacts; general scientific and sports terms; nouns with specific meaning, denoting persons and procedural semantics. The analysis reveals the dependence of evaluative components of meaning on lexical-grammatical compatibility of words, their syntactic function, and syntactic construction features. The study identifies several means of strengthening evaluative semantics: predicate position, isolation, intensifiers, homogeneous series structure, the evaluative component in the semantics of the noun being defined, and antonymy. The integrating and differentiating function of the components of the words meaning in the construction of syntactic constructions with the semantics of qualification is revealed. The following methods are used as methods of analyzing linguistic material semantic, contextual, word-formation, syntactic, and corpus analysis.
Keywords: fake, ideologeme, media corpus, semantics, идеологема, медиакорпус, семантика, фейк, фейковый
2025
№ 3
(Vol. 12)
The aim of the article is to study the tonality of comments on educational video blogs using the sentiment analysis method. Three educational videos of three different bloggers with more than a thousand comments, dedicated to preparation for the OGE/USE were taken. Using language models, the tonality of the comment texts was determined as positive, negative and neutral. Comments were unloaded using MAXQDA, which made it possible to unload the number of likes, replies to comments, dates, etc. as variables. The set of variables was supplemented with data on the number of words, characters, individual parts of speech, exclamations and questions in the comments. Using statistical analysis methods, the obtained samples were analyzed in the context of three videos, as well as negative and positive comments. The Word Cloud tool was used to visualize the frequency of word use in comments to three videos of different tonality. Based on the results of comparing comments with positive and negative tonality, their morphological and syntactic features were identified. In the sample of positive comments, relationships were found between the studied characteristics of the video: the number of responses and the number of verbs and nouns in the comment, as well as the number of exclamations and questions in the comment and its volume. In comments of this type, exclamations and adverbs are more common, and the positive comments themselves are more often found at the top level. The frequency of negative comments in responses is higher than in top-level comments. Negative comments are larger in volume. These two types of comments differ in the number of likes, but do not have statistically significant differences in the number of responses from users. The presented study has limitations associated with the specifics of using language models to assess the tonality of statements and the topics of educational videos.
2025
№ 3
(Vol. 12)
This paper analyzes the media representations of the case of Gonzalo Lira, an American blogger of Chilean descent who died in a Ukrainian prison after being charged with producing and disseminating materials that justified Russia’s Special Military Operation. Investigating how Lira’s story was reported by Ukrainian and U.S. digital media, the article uses the discourse theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to analyze media texts; it also employs Nico Carpentier’s model of the discursive-material knot to evaluate the results of the investigation. They show that the majority of the media outlets with the largest audiences ignored the topic altogether — it was found that only 18 U.S. media and 5 news outlets in Ukraine covered Lira’s story within one week after his death. Meanwhile, the framing used by every outlet reporting on the issue was episodic. Even the U.S. media sympathetic to Lira presented his case without considering it in the broader context of increasingly authoritarian rule in Ukraine and the persecution of dissidents there. It was also found that none of the Ukrainian media that reported on Lira’s death were sympathetic to the blogger, and none of them connected his case to the authoritarianism of the Ukrainian government. The results of the investigation show that digital media with a global reach may contribute to the strengthening of local authoritarianism through the establishment of discursive closures that silence alternative perspectives due to geopolitical concerns. Local authoritarianism may be sustained with the help of the global digital network of democratic media from democratic states that, due to geopolitical considerations, remain blind to human rights violations in a particular society.
2025
№ 3
(Vol. 12)
The paper considers the integrative power of Russian-speaking social media in Post-Soviet realities. Specific focus is granted to how the Russian language spoken in the CIS contributes to the prevalence of Russian-speaking social media — such as VKontakte (internationally referred to as VK), Odnoklassniki (literally ‘classmates’), and Telegram — in the CIS region. The paper analyzes specific internationally unifying characteristics of social media and their influence on political and public life of the civil society with a reference to cases of public institutions taking advantage of social media to mainstream their information policy. The authors underscore the exceptional role of the Russian social media in the integration between Kazakhstan and Russian nationals and the overall competition with non-Russian social platforms amid current global politics. Attempts to develop national online communication platforms in former Soviet states are analyzed suggesting that as matter of fact such platforms are non-existent so far due to external technical, social, and economic factors. In addition, the hypothesis is formulated that social media can expand beyond the limits of a national media resource into a supranational online platform whatever its geographical jurisdiction. The paper provides an insight into existing laws regarding social media and the attempts of national governments to impact social media and their functionality. Using methods of contextual and comparative analysis, information and statistical data analysis, as well as content analysis, the study demonstrates — based on the example of communities on the VK social network — the widespread use of the Russian language among users who are citizens of other countries, as well as the key role of Russian as a tool for interethnic communication and further integration. The research concludes that for Kazakhstan and Russia integration is likely to continue in the years to come with even stronger presence of social media communication.
2025
№ 3
(Vol. 12)
Modern society today is facing a powerful process of subordination to Western influence. A wide range of virtual space tools allows the prompt introduction and dissemination of certain ideas, images and myths necessary for Western culture to manipulate the consciousness of the mass audience. Currently there is negative rhetoric in the English-speaking world towards the Russian-speaking world. The policy of foreign media is aimed at a destructive image of the Russian Federation in order to demonize the fictitious enemy represented by the Russian Federation and cultivate a negative and aggressive attitude towards it. Thus, at present, Western media are actively spreading the myth of Russia as an evil empire (which is a modification of the myth “USSR is an evil empire”), which determines the relevance of this study. The purpose of the article is to analyze the pragmatic modeling of the widespread myth of the Russian Federation — “Russia is an evil empire”, and its linguistic embodiment in the Western virtual press. The sources were 100 articles from January 2022 to August 2022 from the online version of the British daily newspaper The Guardian. The contextual analysis revealed the negative focus of the articles, while the descriptive and semantic methods allowed us to fully characterize each pragmatic model that makes up the single Western myth. The analysis revealed two most common models of the myth: «Dictator» and «Imperialism», aimed at discrediting the image of the country, its president Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, and the Russian people as a whole. It was revealed that the main pragmatic techniques for creating pragmatic models are the technique of mystification, the technique of incrimination, the technique of influencing other people’s feelings, and the technique of narrowing possibilities.
2025
№ 3
(Vol. 12)
This study investigates the changes media texts covering international news undergo when they are translated for domestic audience. Specifically, we focus on ideological stance of the original media texts and the way it is transformed by the ИноСМИ, a digital platform providing access to international news for Russian readers. Pragmatic adaptation of news texts written by foreign journalists involves editing, so the term transediting is employed to analyze this process. The purpose of the present research is to establish the types of modifications involved in transediting. To this end, we compare and contrast the ideological positioning of the source and target texts, paying special attention to the pragmatics of the original media texts written in French and English and their transedited counterparts. We use an integrated approach to media text analysis set within the framework of social semiotics, media translation studies, and functional pragmatics. This study is novel as we see media texts through the lens of multimodal translation and employ the Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis (MCDA) to establish the transformations both in the linguistic and pictorial elements. The findings show that transediting involves interlinguistic and intralinguistic translation and the sample constructs encompass the features of two types of media texts: those covering news and those providing comment and analysis. All the structural elements of the original — its headline, lead and body — are subject to transformations which are either marked or unmarked. Importantly, the pictorial components are modified as well, they undergo substitution in compliance with the pragmatics of the target text. Our research opens avenues for the investigation of techniques used in media translation to alter the ideological positioning expressed both verbally and non-verbally.
2025
№ 3
(Vol. 12)
The article discusses the attempt to systematize the ways of naming a subject in the headlines of current Russian-language media texts of MIA “Russia Today”. The main methods and techniques of linguistic pragmatics aimed at a systematic understanding of the multi-format context of the creation and functioning of the text as a source of objective information about the subject are used. The obtained data were subjected to statistical verification using the Antconc text corpus research program. Speech means naming or pointing to the subject (sender, recipient, person reported in the media text) are highlighted as speech means of the field of personality. Partial differentiation and linguistic-pragmatic interpretation of these speech means have been carried out. Lexical and morphological means are highlighted as dominant. According to the results of linguistic and pragmatic interpretation, the speech means of the personality field are differentiated into the core and the periphery. The core includes speech means of neutral representation of the subject. The peripheral part includes speech tools that provide additional information about the subject and about the sender’s emotional and evalua- tive attitude towards him. A high degree of generalization and depersonalization of the sender and recipient of media text headers was noted. It is proved that the main part of the speech means of the personality field is represented by non-passive subjects of communication. The polyfunctionality of the speech means of the personality field is specified. It is noted that the speech means of the nuclear part of this field implement mainly informative and evocation functions in the headings of media texts, while the speech means of the peripheral part simultaneously with these functions also implement emotive-influencing and manipulative functions. This leads to a high level of pragmatic load and the corresponding potential for the formation of a dialogic tone of media texts.
2025
№ 3
(Vol. 12)
The article deals with the issue of the role and functions of extended variable repetitions (EVR) in the process of the author’s expressing his position on a socially significant political event. This problem is especially relevant for media linguistics. The EVR is understood as a speech unit that performs the function of repeating a thought (position) previously expressed in the text and is structurally and semantically dependent on the main statement, i. e. a thought that has already been voiced. With the help of functional-stylistic, cognitive, interpretative and stylistic-semantic methods it is established that EVR contribute to the realisation of one of the main tasks of the author in a media text — his desire to convince the addressee of the objecti- vity of his political idea, to influence his consciousness in order to create conditions for him to accept the author’s position. The “influence” is defined as the action of a person on another person with the help of speech and accompanying non-verbal means to achieve the goal set by the speaker. It is argued that EVRs functioning in media texts enhance the effectiveness of political communication and make it more influential than if it were without repetitions: through the reproduction of the same thought from different sides and with the help of different logical and semantic operations, the author strives to achieve his intention — to make the addressee his political soulmate. The fact of ideological labelling of the EVR is substantiated. The analyzed texts are, firstly, texts on relevant political topics about the confrontation between Russia and the West or about the complexities of Russia’s internal life; secondly, texts of the same genre — ‘statement on the matter’. These are texts of small volume, heard on TV political talk shows (audio texts) or published in electronic media.
2025
№ 3
(Vol. 12)
The article deals with the problem of syntactic organization of the verbal component of travel media texts. The purpose of the study is to identify the frequency of structural and semantic types of simple sentences in travel media texts and to describe the features of their sphere functioning. Travel media texts of the Russian travel magazine “Voyage” were the empirical material of the study. The analysis was carried out on the media texts published in the “Routes” section in the period from 2016 to 2024. These media texts implement the communicative script of “traveling through the territory”. The following macro-paradigm and particular-paradigm linguistic methods were applied to the factual material: the method of content analysis, descriptive, synchronic, communicative-pragmatic and linguastatistical methods. It has been established that the following constructions are actively used in travel media texts: simple sentences complicated by a series of main or secondary members, introductory and inserted constructions; bisubstantial sentences; impersonal sentences with modal modifiers. The article notes the peculiarities of functioning of the selected syntactic units in the travel media texts of the magazine: the implementation of evaluative-characterizing or evaluativetaxonomic meaning by bisubstantial sentences; polynominality and openness of composed homogeneous series in complicated sentences; the dominance in impersonal sentences of the modal modifier possible, actualizing the single submodus ‘perhaps’; activity of metawords к примеру, например (for example), complementary factual insertions. The author comes to the conclusion that the described syntactic units of the travel media texts of the “Voyage” participate in maintaining national or regional identity; they accumulate and transmit auto- and heterosterotypes. They help to form media images of geographical and historical-cultural objects, which allows for effective branding of territories in the tourist discourse.