Axiological Interaction Of ‘Ours’ And ‘Theirs’ In The American Media Discourse

Abstract

The opposition "ours" and "theirs"/"friend or foe" is axiologically significant in the worldview of a linguocultural community and intercultural communication of representatives of different linguistic cultures. The article deals with modelling the implementation of this opposition in the American media discourse. The sampling corpus incorporates 600 English news reports and feature articles, representing the conflict situation and selected from quality and popular US outlets. The main research methods applied are discourse, semantic, and contextual analysis. The model of the linguocultural opposition under study is based on the determination of the configurations of the evaluative interaction of "ours" and "theirs". In terms of socio-cultural classification, the differentiation of "ours" and "theirs" is grounded on such parameters as "social institutions" and "regional communities", which is due to the subject matter of the analyzed media texts. "Regional community" is a parameter characterised by a higher frequency value, which manifests itself in media texts devoted to external conflicts. A less frequent parameter "social institutions" is traced in media texts devoted to internal conflicts, for example, in the oppositions "religious vs secular", "democrats vs republicans". The prevalence of the parameter "regional community" over the parameter "social institutions" is accounted for by both the fact that the information agenda of the analyzed publications focuses more on external conflicts as well as by the trend to divert attention from domestic problems. Two types of interaction patterns have been singled out -one-model and multi-model.