THE CENTRE AND THE PERIPHERY OF THE POLITICAL VOCABULARY OF A NEWSPAPER (BASED ON THE BRITISH NEWSPAPERS "THE TIMES" AND "THE GUARDIAN")
The purpose of this research is to describe the political vocabulary of a newspaper. The topicality of the research is determined by the specificity of the print mass media: the newspapers remain the most important environment where political texts circulate, which are not only the reflection of political events but the tools of politics as well. The scientific approach applied in this research is determined by the corpus of texts and is based primarily on the quantitative procedures. The newspapers “The Times” published in 1995 and “The Guardian” (2000, 2005, 2010, 2013, 2015) are the empirical basis of the research. The frequency vocabulary and the political sub-corpus were made, which contained the headings connected with politics, functional marks of the authors’ names were taken into account as well. The formula of determining the keywords of the newspaper discourse of the certain period is offered. The most stable units of the political vocabulary of a newspaper (frequent in all the newspapers) refer to the nucleus of the political vocabulary of a newspaper. The words used in four or five sub-corpora, included in the centre of political lexicon, do not differ semantically or grammatically from the keywords from the nucleus of the political vocabulary. The rest of the keywords refer to the periphery of the political vocabulary of a newspaper. The keywords of the political vocabulary of a newspaper are divided into several groups (connected with the government, ideological abstracts, connected with the elections and votes, concerned with the social politics, elements of the economic policy).