Image of the Country in the Persuasive Space of Media Discourse

Abstract

This paper presents the country‘s image analysis through the persuasion prism. Any event‘s relevance and value are determined by the media‘s meaningful focus on the event. Knowledge in the information shape points to the country‘s awareness providing a real image. The authors focus on media discourse as a meaning-generation linguistic phenomenon with an impact function. Furthermore, media discourse reflects the addresser‘s strategic intention by the text architectonics, implemented by persuasion linguistic and pragmatic means. It is proved the media discourse space is conditioned by persuasiveness. The continuous sampling method, methods based on principles of discourse, and text-oriented and function-oriented analysis are used in this paper to solve the research question and achieve the research goal. The analysis carried out on Kazakhstan‘s image example demonstrated the specific space of verbalized media texts transforms a special world of events and processes encoded by linguistic and pragmatic means. As the analysis result, linguistic and pragmatic means of constructing the discourse strategy ―New Kazakhstan‖ have been identified in the study. The predictive model tactics are generated on the persuasive headlines basis that are described by metaphors and positive epithets, action verbs of history, and ideological content. The evaluative meaning ‗immersed‘ in the content is emphasized. The country‘s identity is constructed through the images – ―New Kazakhstan‖, ―Historical Past‖, ―Territory of the Country‖, ―Knowledge about the Country‖, and ―A Political Leader‖.