Decoding Evaluative Senses in the Discourse of English Mass Media

Abstract

The research considers the study of the media texts devoted to the topic of burning political-military conflict issues as exemplified in the UK and the US quality and popular press. The clarification of the term ‘conflict’ employed in this study is given. The importance of the opposition ‘we-they’ while describing any conflict is underlined. It is highlighted that the above mentioned category is realized on various language levels, namely, those of lexical, morphological, and syntactic ones. The conclusion is drawn that one of the means for the introduction of an evaluation meaning into a media text is quantification of evaluation frames.

Keywords

• discourse of media
• media text
• news report
• “we”
• “they”
• opposition
• conflict
• evaluation
• frame
• decoding