Being a much-studied concept in the social and political sciences and cultural studies (

The paper explores the role of the media in influencing public opinion from an inferential-pragmatic perspective. It presents preliminary results of the study focused on representation of Russia in Western newspapers. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995,2001; van Dijk 2009) and media linguistics (Fowler 1991, Richardson 2007, among others) the study centres around the linguistic means of construing ambiguity/uncertainty, viewed as a strategy of persuasion. We mostly focus on the semantics of certain groups of words and other textual features such as indefinite pronouns, epistemic modality, passive voice, present perfect tense, interrogative headlines and some other tools used in media texts to construe ambiguity which, in its turn, arguably aims at influencing public opinion. We also look at presupposition, information structure, evaluation and transitivity. Though we have limited our study to the English language sources (The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, news websites of the BBC, Reuters, Express, Politico and Fox News, among others), we are not suggesting that linguistic ambiguity is a feature of Western, rather than Russian, or other languages' media.

The impact of mass media on individuals and society is to a great extent based on emotions. We concentrate on fear as it is one of the basic emotions triggered by risk and threat, which is claimed to play a key role in the twenty-first century consciousness (Furedi 20018). The study focuses on the emotionalisation of fear in contemporary media discourse about Russia, more specifically, on constructions of Russian threat and fear of Russia in Anglo-American media texts to highlight pragmatic effects and to speculate on possible purposes of such discourses. The study aims to explore the functioning of the lexemes threat and fear , in textual contexts with the focus on their pragma-discursive characteristics. It identifies the mechanisms as well as linguistic tools involved in media strategies of scare-mongering. The dataset was derived from quality British and American newspapers in the period 2018-2020, and was analysed drawing on an interdisciplinary approach combining critical discourse analysis, pragmatics, medialinguistics, psycholinguistics and the theory of proximisation. The paper argues that appealing to emotions as well as constructing emotions is aimed at enhancing the persuasive function of media and fulfilling their own agenda. The persistent use of the words threat and fear in relation to Russia as well as the obsessive discussion of this topic in media aim to shape a certain negative public opinion of Russia among readerships. The findings show that to achieve this goal different strategies and linguistic tools are used including: exaggeration, repetition, proximisation, interrogative headlines, presupposition, among others. The results go beyond linguistics, and may find implementation in political studies, since they provide researchers with tools for understanding contemporary social and political processes.

Despite the fact that legal discourse is intended to be clear, precise and unambiguous, in legal terminology there are obvious signs of cultural variability that can be observed not only in different languages, but also in varieties of the same language. Ignorance of cultural differences in legal terminology and legal discourse can lead to serious complications in an intercultural context. This study is limited to terms of reference and forms of address to judges of different levels in the British, Irish, American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand varieties of English in a courtroom setting. The goal of the study is to analyze the terms of references and forms of address to judges in these varieties of English, identify their similarities and culture specific features and try to find the reasons for the differences. The data were obtained from various sources: dictionaries, legal documents, newspapers, as well as some secondary sources (Brown & Rice 2007, Hickey 2008, McPeake 2010) and Internet resources. They were analysed drawing on studies of pluricentric languages (Clyne 1992, Kloss 1967, Leitner 1992, Muhr & Marley 2015), World Englishes Paradigm (Bolton 2006, 2017; Crystal 2003, Domashnev 2000, Kachru 1985, 1986, 1988, 2008; Low & Pakir 2017, Proshina 2012, 2017, 2019); implementing comparative, semantic, pragmatic, discursive and cultural analysis. To explain some of the results, the legal and political systems of the countries that speak the national varieties of English were analysed. Preliminary results of the study revealed both similarities and differences in the terms of reference and forms of address to judges of various ranks, caused by a nexus of historical, political and social reasons that require further study. Among these, one can note the degree of openness of society to the democratization of its legal system, the country's desire to either follow the traditions established in British judicial discourse, or to demonstrate their uniqueness and independence from the former colonial power. Despite its limited nature, the study provides some new data showing that the lexical and discursive variability observed in the legal sphere contributes to the formation of varieties of pluricentric languages. The results can contribute to the study of pluricentric languages, find application in lexicographic practice, as well as in the teaching of legal English to law students.

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