DISCOURSE WORLD OF INFORMATION AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE: REPRESENTATIONAL STRUCTURE IN THE CORPUS
The article deals with the issues of world modeling in foreign mass media. It explores the discursive world of information and psychological warfare objectified by the textual means of English - language mass media. The aim of the study is to characterize the discourse world of information and psychological warfare as a representational structure on the basis of the corpus data. Research tasks comprise the identification of the key macroframes and of the specificity of formation of frames and ideological implications reflecting the media reality constructed in the world of discourse. The sample contains 101 texts from the "News on the Web" corpus published over the period from 2015 to 2020. The study employs the descriptive method, the discourse analysis, the contextual analysis, and the mixed method of qualitative and quantitative analysis. The study investigates the ontological characteristics of the discourse world of information and psychological warfare and defines the notion of representational structure. The author attests the feasibility of the combination of socio - constructionist, cognitive - discursive and corpus approaches for the analysis of mental and linguistic constructs of discourse. The representational structure in the English - language media is parameterized. To reveal the macroframes, involved in the media discursive meaning - making, a quantitative analysis of the key elements, found in the corpus, is carried out. A qualitative characteristic of the discourse world of information and psychological warfare via key nouns and phrases, singled out in the corpus is given. It is argued that the macroframes INFORMATION and CONFRONTATION serve as cognitive ‘pillars’ of discourse world of information and psychological warfare, and that they have an elaborate frame - slot organization. The article looks at the framing foci as interpretative schemas, according to which readers’ opinions are shaped. The author analyzes the ideological implications which determine the nature of confrontation between the West and Russia. The results of the study may present interest to discourse analysts and the scholars who develop the World-Modeling Theory.