This article takes a bird’s eye view of how positive or negative sentiments in the news press about countries and nationality nouns seem to reflect the country’s general income groups. The study focuses on the four income groups classified by the World Bank and their co-occurrence with positively and negatively classified adjectives from the Subjectivity Lexicon for Czech. A search in the journalistic subcorpus of the SYN series, release 8 of the Czech National Corpus, results in a time line covering three decades. Previous research on subjectivity has either focused on other parts of the Subjectivity Lexicon or on fewer adjectives from other languages. In this article, it is argued that the income groups are treated in descending order, i.e., the higher the income, the more positive the sentiment. Even when the most influential groups in the top and bottom are removed, the result holds. Discourse concerning global war and peace, and the security of different nations, is also detected as a result.

Language may be seen as a tool for constructing and confirming power structures, and a corpus analysis of adjacent words may reveal how individuals or groups of people other than the sender (writer or speaker) are depicted. These depictions frequently reveal a phenomenon known as linguistic othering. The aim of this paper is to present a corpus-based survey of the linguistic othering of Roma, Vietnamese and Ukrainian people in Czech media discourse from 1989 to 2014. The representative result is acquired by comparing neutral, positive and negative adjectives related to the three key lemmata, and a quantitative method is used to answer analytical questions about the query words in this context. Although some previous researchers have used similar methods, it appears that no such study has been performed on such a large body of material for Slavic languages. The outcome reveals how these three groups are differentiated in text, and the source material helps to demonstrate how language usage reflects the discourse of Czech society.

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