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12Volume 5 Issue 2, 2021, pp. 73-89
doi: 10.22363/2521-442X-2021-5-2-73-89
Original Research
Semantic shift in conflict terminology in contemporary Russian socio-cultural media discourse
by Alina S. Antipova, Maria D. Rabeson and Olga V. Smirnova
Alina S. Antipova Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia antipovaaline@gmail.com Maria D. Rabeson Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia maria.rabeson@gmail.com Olga V. Smirnova Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia smirnovaorama@gmail.com Article history Received April 3, 2021 | Revised May 22, 2021 | Accepted June 14, 2021 Conflicts of interest The authors declared no conflicts of interest
Research funding The study is supported by the Interdisciplinary Scientific and Educational School of Moscow University 'Preservation of the World Cultural and Historical Heritage' doi 10.22363/2521-442X-2021-5-2-73-89
For citation Antipova, A. S., Rabeson, M. D., & Smirnova, O. V. (2021). Semantic shift in conflict terminology in contemporary Russian socio-cultural media discourse. Training, Language and Culture, 5(2), 73-89.
Current socio-cultural means of communication stand no comparison to the ones that existed even a decade ago. Media have introduced new information exchange practices, provided novel areas for communication, triggered wider civic participation in social life worldwide. The increase of digitalised texts available to the public on an everyday basis on the Internet have created media-focused space whose main characteristic is constant content change. Therefore, each specific social sphere may be traced throughout content provided in media sources internationally and locally. Conflict as one of the key ideas of the media zone is not an exception, being one of the most commonly reported topics in the news globally. Our study is based on revealing semantic features of conflict terminology that is understood as the number of related-to-conflict words used together in socio-cultural media discourse. While global contexts are usually more vulnerable to long-lasting meaning change, socially and culturally predetermined local contexts tend to be less considered having shorter time to evolve and be viewed. However, smaller meaning shifts or changes in word usages occur here ubiquitously and may be revealed in short-term perspective of analysing more flexible information slices. The purpose of this study is to reveal contextual short-term meaning changes for conflict terminology in leading federal Russian newspapers and online media sources. The corpus of 10,707 texts was formed based on the occurrence of conflict-related topics as the object of this research. The research period was January-December 2020. The selection and analysis of publications was carried out using Integrum (the information retrieval system for monitoring and analysing the media) and word2vec (an algorithm based on artificial neural networks). The original methodology made it possible to determine the share of publications on conflict in the total mass of media reports to identify key thematic areas of conflict information agenda, features of its geography, to describe the semantic field of conflict and show its dynamics in time.
KEYWORDS: media discourse, Russian media, conflictology, conflict terminology, semantic shift
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© Alina S. Antipova, Maria D. Rabeson, Olga V. Smirnova 2021
This content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Volume 5 Issue 2, 2021, pp. 73-89
1. INTRODUCTION
One of the key trends in modern development is the mediatisation of all social processes (Var-tanova & Gladkova, 2020; Vladimirova et al., 2020; Gureeva & Kuznetsova, 2021). 'Conceptualisation of the process of mediatisation primarily occurs within the framework of critical analysis of the relationship between media and society. The role of mediatisation as a theoretical framework is recognised by scientific community and helps to trace the mutual influence and transformation of media sphere and communication process as well as social processes' (Gureeva, 2019, p. 15).
The high intensity of media informational involvement into the area of social conflicts of various kinds and levels has always been observed. To a large extent, this is due to the fact that in the context of digitalisation, society observes conflicts through mediating lenses (Budka & Bräucher, 2020). Media support becomes a natural part of the conflict throughout its development from the beginning to the resolution including its consequences. There are also tendencies towards the strengthening of media control of conflicts, which creates the basis for manipulation, production of fake news and further intensification of social contradictions. In fact, the media themselves are turning into a kind of conflict terminology factory, constructing key social meanings and creating semantic shifts. All of the above creates the basis for a media-centric approach to the study of social conflicts and conflict terminology in socio-cultural media discourse using interdisciplinary approaches and methodological tools.
The researchers emphasise the nature of the conflict as a purely intangible phenomenon, estimated indirectly through the traces left as the results of conflict interaction in the material world. Such traces in contemporary conditions of digitalisation are recorded primarily in socio-cultural media discourse and seem to be the most important indicators of both the level of conflict in society as a whole and a certain stage of its development. The analysis of these indicators, as well as further comprehension of the role of the media in covering, diagnosing, and developing ways to resolve
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the conflict and reduce the level of conflict tension in society seem to be important tasks that require serious attention from researchers. In this context, it is the content of the media discourse that is the key source of analysis.
Temporal dynamics of contextual meaning change is usually a characteristic of socio-cultural media discourse and periodical textual units that cover a span of specific social and political phenomena reflected in them.
The regular process of linguistic change in word semantics is analysed throughout different verbal storages based, due to current rapid development of information flow, mostly on big datasets such as corpora of contemporary languages, Google Ngrams and some other specialised frameworks. This approach has shown its significance and value in the case of the process of long-lasting meaning change, although today's world sets new goals presupposed by the major transformation in human and social communication that has become instant and contextualised.
The idea of the relationship between long-lasting meaning changes and word frequencies has been already discussed in a number of computational semantic change detection studies (Hamilton et al., 2016; Kahmann et al., 2017). Compared to long-lasting semantic shifts that take years and even decades, short-term semantic shifts may occur in socio-cultural media contexts in monthly periods reflecting changes in word usage rather than in meaning itself. Conflict-based terminology in this case is viewed as a constantly changing semantic cloud of related-to-conflict words and is viewed with respect to short-term frequencies.
Distributional semantic methods put forward the hypothesis that a word's meaning is conveyed in its co-occurrence relationships (Al Farsi, 2018). Our study, therefore, focuses on local changes to a word's nearest semantic neighbours that are more likely to experience socio-cultural drifts.
It is also stated that nouns are more likely to undergo changes due to irregular cultural shifts while verbs, for instance, more readily participate in regular processes of semantic change (Traugott & Dasher, 2001). Our research, consequently, fo-
by Alina S. Antipova, Maria D. Rabeson and Olga V. Smirnova
cuses on semantically related-to-conflict groups of nouns (N=30) for every media source as we follow the idea of sensitivity of nominal shifts to short-term culturally predetermined contextual changes in the Russian language. We estimate the degree of pair relationships of conflict-related words in each time period stating that in the case of short-term semantic shift, contextual similarity increase in time indicates specific usage of connected pairs.
2. MATERIAL AND METHODS
The objective of the study was to analyse the semantic shift in conflict terminology in contemporary Russian socio-cultural media discourse. The basic methods are content analysis, comparative analysis, descriptive method, continuous sampling method, statistical and historical method of linguistic analysis.
Using Integrum - an information retrieval system for monitoring and analysing the media - and the word2vec algorithm, we were able to promptly analyse significant volumes of digital texts in order to build models for recording the occurrence of words and identify semantically close lexical units and whole groups (Integrum, 2020). Some previous research analysing the creative potential of Russian political discourse in 2010-2020 using the linguistic material collected from the Integrum electronic mass media archive suggested that relevant results can be achieved through this kind of study (Kozlovskaya et al., 2020; Kiose, 2020).
The objects of the study are Russian federal socio-political newspapers Komsomolskaya Pravda, Rossiyskaya Gazeta and Kommersant, as well as online resources Lenta.Ru and Gazeta.Ru. Research period covers the months of January through December of 2020.
The selection and analysis of publications on the topic of conflict was carried out using Inte-grum configured to select texts including the key word 'conflict'. The word2vec algorithm based on artificial neural networks was used to detect se-mantically close words to the key concept of conflict. Integrum was later applied to detect the change frequencies of the closest word pairs. Integrum is the largest factual archive of the mass me-
dia in Europe. The system provides the opportunity to search specific materials and create automatised monitoring for more than 120,000 publications, TV channels and radio broadcasts, including selected media. The word2vec algorithm based on artificial neural networks allows obtaining vector representations of words, which is currently one of the most regularly applied methods for processing large data arrays in a short time. This fully meets the tasks of analysing media content that changes with high frequency. In our study, we used the method of creating word vectors - numerical representations of words that preserve semantic similarity within and outside contexts. The functionality of the Integrum system made it possible to determine the total number of journalistic materials published in the studied media in 2020 (259,227 items in total), as well as select from them publications containing the keyword 'conflict' (10,707 items in total). Sample B1 was formed on the basis of these publications. After that, the proportion of publications of the B1 sample in the total content of both individual media and their aggregate was determined.
Using word2vec, we were able to conduct a step-by-step analysis of the frequency of words within the media studied. The main semantic core of 'conflict' was built up according to the principle of including only nouns. The core of the lexical system of the language is most often identified on the basis of the frequency criterion. Therefore, the calculation of the average frequency of words occurrence allows attribution to lexical units the frequency of which is higher than the average to the core, while leaving all of those, which frequency is below the average on the periphery. The frequency ranges of connection occurrence of the word 'conflict' and the keywords in the core are set by the model automatically. The most repeated connections were identified during the analysis according to the principle of reducing the vector connection with the main categorising concept.
Proper names were not excluded from the analysis, which made it possible to identify the links between 'conflict' as a categorising concept and the specific culture-related objects or subjects.
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In addition, in the content of each example of the media under study, such publications were identified in which, in line with the keyword 'conflict', there were keywords that are parts of the semantic core for sample B1, namely: Russian, President, USA, Ukraine and Karabakh. These pairs were chosen as having the highest scores. Then the dynamics of pair frequencies for 'conflict' keyword in publications was analysed by months Jan-Dec, 2020 in the Integrum database.
3. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Conflictology as a field of knowledge is aimed at identifying and explaining factors that systematically generate contradictions, social tension, and collisions in society. Recognition of contradictions as the natural state of any social system is one of the important criteria when considering the causes and circumstances of social conflict emergence. Researchers into various disciplinary directions in the field of conflict management emphasise that the impact on conflict and its resolution is predominantly informational in its nature. In modern conditions of digitalisation of all spheres of social reality, the role of the media in conflicts has critically increased (Smirnova & Shkondin, 2021). However, in the context of mediatisation of all spheres of public life, one can speak not only about the key role of media in informing society about conflicts, but often about their decisive role in escalating, stimulating and even creating conflict situations and processes (Vartanova, 2021; Vartanova & Gladkova, 2020; Smirnova, 2021).
According to the classical paradigm, conflict management is aimed at revealing the reasons and mechanisms that usually induce social tension, contradictions and oppositions in society. The con-flictological paradigm, which has been used by researchers for a long time, seems to be the key one today. One of the important criteria of the paradigm was the recognition of conflict as a natural state of any social system (Vladimirov, 2013, p. 176). At the initial stages of conflictology development, the main approaches, as noted, were associated with the study of the causes and functions of the conflict and the construction of the conflict
doi: 10.22363/2521-442X-2021-5-2-73-89
'Discourse approach in social context examines the interaction patterns between participants, social goals and types of social events. A question of particular interest is how the discursive practice reflects the relationship between text and social practice'
theory (Boulding 1962; Galtung, 2008). Thus, a methodological foundation was formed for 'modelling conflicts through the identification and use of structural and dynamic indicators and indicators common to all conflict types, as well as for examination by assessing their specific state on the basis of certain criteria and for developing recommendations for their constructive settlement' (Antsupov, 2018, p. 29). Above we have already emphasised the processes of mediatisation of social conflicts noted by researchers caused among other things by the high intensity of media informational involvement in social conflicts of various kinds and levels. The digitalisation of media has created conditions for society to observe conflicts through mediating lenses (Budka & Braucher, 2020) and for a media-centric approach to the analysis of conflicts and conflict terminology in media discourse.
Discourse approach in social context examines the interaction patterns between participants, social goals and types of social events. A question of particular interest is how the discursive practice reflects the relationship between text and social practice. Temporal shifts in the meaning are widely considered in scientific literature. However, other valuable dimensions, such as socio-cultural variability, remain less investigated. One synchronic approach was introduced to detect semantic shifts between different sets of texts that share a specific metadata feature (Azarbonyad et al., 2017). Neural embedded vectors were used to analyse semantic space. This approach captures meaningful semantic shifts and can help improve other tasks such as the contrastive viewpoint summary or ideology detection.
by Alina S. Antipova, Maria D. Rabeson and Olga V. Smirnova
'The semantic field of conflict is extremely diverse. Conflict terminology in media discourse seems to be very sensitive to any changes in the global situation, thus, representing a vast domain for research into the possible semantic shifts in short-term perspectives'
Linguistic research of conflictology is one of the priority areas of study (Palij & Poteryakhina, 2018). We define conflict as confrontation of subjects with its own structure, constituents, and the conflict situation in which an unfolding conflict arises. As the media are not only a means of conveying information, but also a very powerful tool for shaping opinions, linguistic reconstruction of a conflict in media discourse is a way to perceive and interpret a conflict, the characteristics of the sides involved and the stages of its development.
The semantic field of conflict is extremely diverse. The theme of territorial and political conflict is covered within the framework of all the publications presented in the study. Conflict terminology in media discourse seems to be very sensitive to any changes in the global situation, thus, representing a vast domain for research into the possible semantic shifts in short-term perspectives.
Currently, the traditional approach to semantic shift focuses on the resulting changes in meaning as well as on the classification of these changes (Traugott, 2017; Kondratyuk et al., 2021; Shamio-nov, 2020). At the same time, the particular examples of semantic change are regarded separately from the broad context of their use. However, language represents a specific type of communicative activity which is highly dependent on the contextual parameters, including both the type of discourse and the socio-cultural framework. The general mechanism of semantic change can be to some extent inferred from the laws of common mental changes in the population. Most recent research in the field has aimed rather to reveal the pragmatic factors, leading to semantic shift than to
describe the essence of particular changes. Cognitive linguists often approach semantic shift as a reflection or projection of the socio-physical world on the processes of reasoning (Sweetser, 1990). The core postulate of this approach states that words have no set meaning, i.e. they only evoke some meaning and serve as clues to the potential notion, as instructions to meaning reconstruction in the contextual field (Paradis, 2011). These meanings are non-discrete and can be described in a set of prototypical features with core and peripheral areas.
Representing reflections of 'conceptual organisation, categorisation principles, processing mechanisms, and experiential and environmental influences' (Geeraerts & Cuyckens, 2007, p. 3), linguistic meaning has a perspectivation function. This approach was deeply theoretically elaborated in the philosophical, epistemological position taken by cognitive linguistics (Lakoff, 2008; Johnson, 2013).
Semantic shift is often triggered by the change in language conventions within the group of speakers. This process is deeply rooted in socio-cultural and discursive practices as well as in the other paralinguistic factors. For instance, developing the system of key-words analysis (Wierzbicka, 2006) reveals not only the trends in lexicon along with the change in cultural schemas, but also the way lexical meaning evolves reflecting and promoting cultural change.
Key words reflect the worldview and attitude to certain historical, social, and political issues, determining the specific functional style in discourse. Key words are significant in the description of a historical moment, since they most objectively represent the life of the period under study. Keywords have been studied from a number of perspectives, e.g. linguistic-specific concepts of language (Wierzbicka, 1997; Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2013), though semantic shift mostly remained beyond the scope of attention in this paradigm.
In the 20th century, profound research focused on semantic fields which include interconnected sets of lexical units. The idea of shifts and changes in semantic space was described in the studies of
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terminology development (Kay, 1975; Williams, 1976). These studies set the scene for the systematic analysis of semantic shifts based on the accumulated data.
Semantic field is a set of actual linguistic units that have semantic unity (a common seme or group of semes). The lexical-semantic field is divided into three components: core, centre and periphery. However, functional-semantic or grammatical-lexical fields often overlap and diffuse, although it is possible to distinguish between functional-thematic and functional-semantic, which emphasises that the semantic field is not determined by general language use but rather appears in particular language material. If the research material is represented as a text or a group of texts, functional-textual fields that do not differ from the linguistic ones in essence are identified, though they often differ from the linguistic field in the composition of the core and the periphery.
Semantic mapping also represents a suitable instrument for semantic change research. Developed as visual representations of interconnections in different concepts (Croft, 2001, p. 96), abstract maps can help to identify related meanings and to assess the extent of their similarity (Auwera, 2013). Moreover, they can be interpreted as references to close semantic clusters.
Research into semantic shift also involves the analysis of collocations, the relationship between words or lexical groups that coincide in the text. As the 20th century saw an immense increase in the availability of historical digital corpora, research into semantic shift gained some new approaches to the data processing. A pool of innovative methodologies was elaborated to explain semantic changes as a motivated construct (Allan & Robinson, 2011) as well as to apply the research into shifts to practice. These methodologies widely support the assertion that a great proportion of change occurs in minor segments that can be observed in clusters of textual shifts in collocations.
Computer-mediated statistical approaches to corpora analysis involve the investigation of collocates and co-occurring units in various contexts. Thus, shifts in collocations reflect the change in
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meaning if observed in 'diachronic collostruction-al analysis' (Hilpert, 2008). Semantic shift or change is often associated with the long-term processes in the structure of meaning of a semantic unit (word, or to be more precise, lexeme). However, it is also possible to interpret semantic shift as a phenomenon, manifested in language activity during short time spans (Newman, 2015).
However, short-term effects of change (Hilpert, 2012) have also been observed, which might suggest that the particular context can contribute to long-term semantic shifts. Web crawling techniques are also used for the purpose of applying statistical designs to a broad variety of texts (Kerre-mans et al., 2012). Distributional modelling of word meaning was also applied to the study of automatic semantic shift detection (Fiser & Ljubesic, 2019).
In recent years, pragmatic shifts in meaning have been regarded as the basis of semantic change (Fitzmaurice, 2016). As the research into variations and discursive specifics of semantics have broadened, it has became possible to combine synchronic and diachronic work in the study of semantic change. In this paper, short-term di-achronic perspective is combined with a syn-chronic perspective to analyse the possible markers and prerequisites for the long-term consequences of contextual factors in semantic change.
Research into semantic change has recently benefited from innovative methodological opportunities. These include the immense development of digitalised corpora, unfolding new possibilities for big data analysis, and innovative computational technologies, providing statistically reliable methods for the processing of semantic information. Combination of the two conditions not only opens up a way to describe particular events within semantic fields, but also to understand core mechanisms of changes in semantics.
Several research approaches have been applied to the study of semantic shifts (Dubossarsky, 2018). These paradigms differ in three dimensions: (1) top-down or bottom-up modes of information processing; (2) large-scale or narrow scope of focus; (3) the use of rigorous statistical method. It is
by Alina S. Antipova, Maria D. Rabeson and Olga V. Smirnova
'Word frequency has even been applied to explain semantic shifts, presumably high-frequency words are more likely to lose extra shades of meaning'
worth noting that all types of research methodologies are currently widely used in semantic research and support rather than replace the others.
The traditional semantic approach provides a valuable source of insights into the mechanisms and trends in semantic change, e.g. the database of semantic shifts (Zalizniak et al., 2012). Another perspective evaluates the shift in terms of the quantitative change in distributional statistics viewed from a diachronic perspective. Several examples can be found in relevant literature: measuring the shifts in target word frequencies (Bybee, 2006), diachronic collostructural analysis which is based on the statistical interdependence of frequencies of co-occurrence of two words (Hilpert, 2014). The quantitative paradigm is often used, though the top-down approach prevails, e.g. detecting semantic shift for further qualitative analysis (Tantucci et al., 2018). Word frequency has even been applied to explain semantic shifts, presumably high-frequency words are more likely to lose extra shades of meaning.
The computational paradigm states that meaning can be inferred from the context of the word use in language. As per the hypothesis of data distribution, close words occur in similar contexts. This postulate constitutes the foundation for most contemporary corpora computational models that focus on contextual clues to interpret meanings.
It is worth saying that none of the paradigms mentioned above deals directly with word representation. Instead, the meaning is either inferred subjectively (as in the traditional model), or interpreted through the strength of association (as in the quantitative approach). In contrast to these two systems, the computational paradigm necessarily first represents word meanings and then defines semantic change as a measurable difference between the two representations.
4. STUDY AND RESULTS
In this research the publications of the selected media were analysed during the yearly period from January to December 2020. At the first stage, the selected methodology made it possible to estimate the proportion of publications containing conflict terminology in the total array of media reports. Thus, in the course of the first procedure, a sample of publications # = 10 707 (sample B1) containing the keyword 'conflict' was formed. This sample correlated with the total number of publications in the selected media for the investigated period (sample B0) # = 259227 publications. Thus, publications containing conflict terminology averaged 4,1% of the total volume of publications. However, significant differences are noticeable in the presence of conflict terminology in the periodicals analysed: the maximum share of texts with conflict terminology is demonstrated by Kommer-sant, the minimum - by Gazeta.Ru (Table 1).
The next procedure involved the analysis of the lexical-semantic field of B1 sample using the word2vec algorithm, which included only lexical units denoting the actants of situations. The core of the lexical system of the language is most often identified on the basis of the criterion of frequency. Calculating the average frequency of a word allows to reveal the vocabulary that shows the highest frequency if compared to the average. This vocabulary constitutes the core. Words whose frequency is below the average are referred to as the periphery. The procedure made it possible to identify the field around the word 'conflict' that was considered in all forms with flexions. The semantic core was built up out of 30 most common nouns and was generated automatically according to the principle of identifying nominal units for objects and subjects including proper names with the highest scores. The occurrence of words was checked both for the 'conflict' joint category for all periodicals and within each of the media separately. Table 2 presents the data obtained for Komsomolskaya Pravda, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Kommer-sant, Lenta.Ru and Gazeta.Ru correspondingly. Semantic analysis to a large extent confirmed the data obtained with the help of Integrum.
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Table 1
Publications including conflict as the key notion
PERIODICAL TOTAL NUMBER OF
TEXTS IN 2020
Komsomolskaya Pravda 7,366
Rossiyskaya Gazeta 16,492
Kommersant 5,576
Gazeta.Ru 133,221
Lenta.Ru 96,572
X 259,227
Table 2
Conflict terminology semantic core KEY WORD SEMANTIC CORE
Conflict
A group of words describing geographical objects is significant for the problem under consideration. It includes 6 words out of 30: USA, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Karabakh, Turkey. Words are listed in decreasing order of frequency, that is, listing the more frequently used words first before the less frequently used ones last. Thus, it can be argued that news reports related to the United States in our study were encountered more often (11,531) than those reporting on Ukraine (9,578), Azerbaijan (8,482), Armenia (8,166), Karabakh (8,166) and Turkey (4,582). In addition to the proper names of specific places associated with conflict, the core includes more abstract nouns associated with location (region, territory) and state system (republic, state).
The semantic field of conflict also contains a large group of words describing various aspects of conflict environment and actions associated with it. This group included: situation, attitude, action,
More than Meets the Eye: A Closer Look at Professional Discourse doi: 10.22363/2521-442X-2021-5-2-73-89
TEXTS WITH THE PERCENTAGE OF TEXTS WITH
WORD CONFLICT THE WORD CONFLICT (%)
326 4,4%
584 3,5%
755 13,5%
4,408 3,3%
4,634 4,8%
10,707 4,1%
solution, problem, result, number, and negotiation. The subjects of conflict are represented at the core by the words minister, representative, group and power. This block also includes more specific nouns describing the general subjects of power, including proper names: president, head, Vladimir (Putin), leader. The aspect of the relevance and coverage of conflict is represented by the words in news and photos.
Further on, within the same methodology, the semantic cores of 30 nouns for the category 'conflict' were identified for each periodical selected for the analysis (Table 3).
Analysing semantic fields for conflict as a categorising category by periodical revealed significant meaning shift between media. This shift may be described in terms of frequency differences in specific conflict terminology combination. The most frequently used units included in the semantic core of the official state periodical Rossiyskaya
conflict, president, usa, ukraine, azerbaijan, armenia, head, karabakh, situation, attitude, action, power, decision, turkey, republic, news, territory, state, region, number, vladimir, minister, photo, result, problem, group, representative, court, leader, negotiations
by Alina S. Antipova, Maria D. Rabeson and Olga V. Smirnova
Table 3
Conflict terminology semantic core (by periodical) PERIODICAL SEMANTIC CORE
conflict, photo, azerbaijan, president, armenia, karabakh, ukraine, usa, news, power,
Lenta.ru
channel, action, attitude, situation, republic, head, ria, territory, region, turkey, group, man, decision, state, company, leader, donbass, problem, murder, result
Gazeta.Ru conflict, president, usa, ukraine, head, action, karabakh, armenia, situation, azerbaijan,
attitude, turkey, power, decision, republic, state, news, territory, minister, result, negotiations, trump, leader, Vladimir, ria, statement, number, representative, region, donbass
Kommersant president, mister, conflict, head, usa, company, situation, decision, rf, attitude, power,
vladimir, project, sergey, market, court, number, elections, ruble, negotiations, representative, government, problem, region, turkey, action, group, million, minister, ukraine
Komsomolskaya Pravda conflict, family, attitude, karabakh, thousand, president, usa, situation, azerbaijan, armenia,
parent, alexander, problem, ukraine, history, ruble, school, power, million, son, turkey, film, month, apartment, territory, court, sergey, state, moment, daughter
Rossiyskaya Gazeta federation, law, legacy, president, decision, body, article, usa, court, attitude, citizen, power,
conflict, situation, number, state, history, territory, head, system, government, organization, service, problem, thousand, action, rf, measure, condition, subject
Gazeta turned out to be federation, law, law body and article. Kommersant most frequently used semantic units such as mister, company, project, market and rouble. The semantic core of Komsomolskaya Pravda, aimed at a mass audience, showed the priority of conflicts related to family and relationships.
The next procedure was to identify the frequency of semantic pairs presumably demonstrating reference vectors in the information agenda in
connection with specific people, countries, hot spots, etc. that are relevant in different periods of 2020 and the dynamics of their usage in different publications within the year by month. To test this technique, the following semantic pairs were selected: conflict/Russian; conflict/president; conflict/USA; conflict/Ukraine; conflict/Karabakh. To hypothesise short-term semantic shifts, an analysis of pair frequencies throughout each periodical was carried out (Tables 4-8, Figures 1-5).
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Table 4
'Conflict/Russian' pair frequencies (by periodical, by month)
PERIODICAL JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC
Komsomolskaya Pravda 9 6 9 6 8 8 7 9 3 21 24 10
Rossiyskaya Gazeta 55 60 39 37 21 52 51 48 42 56 64 59
Kommersant 33 46 28 17 15 25 33 31 44 53 37 59
Gazeta.Ru 150 178 93 102 88 127 122 108 116 193 232 164
Lenta.Ru 115 151 96 91 98 119 155 108 142 183 353 215
I 362 441 265 253 230 331 368 304 347 506 710 507
by Alina S. Antipova, Maria D. Rabeson and Olga V. Smirnova
Table 5
'Conflict/President' pair frequencies (by periodical, by month)
PERIODICAL JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC
Komsomolskaya Pravda 10 8 4 4 0 5 8 13 2 17 14 5
Rossiyskaya Gazeta 29 20 18 12 14 27 22 21 17 21 36 28
Kommersant 35 35 28 18 16 22 32 40 46 64 47 45
Gazeta.Ru 197 186 105 88 97 124 145 128 166 305 221 135
Lenta.Ru 166 184 88 61 99 91 138 112 159 327 269 157
I 437 433 243 183 226 269 345 314 390 734 587 370
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Table 6
'Conflict/USA' pair frequencies (by periodical, by month)
PERIODICAL JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC
Komsomolskaya Pravda 5 9 5 8 1 8 5 4 2 17 13 6
Rossiyskaya Gazeta 21 20 8 7 7 24 16 7 13 12 11 18
Kommersant 20 25 11 10 10 19 20 18 21 32 23 22
Gazeta.Ru 138 129 54 67 75 111 106 91 98 166 105 70
Lenta.Ru 136 100 45 47 91 90 69 52 87 164 102 89
I 320 283 123 139 184 252 216 172 221 391 254 205
by Alina S. Antipova, Maria D. Rabeson and Olga V. Smirnova
Table 7
'Conflict/Ukraine' pair frequencies (by periodical, by month)
PERIODICAL JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC
Komsomolskaya Pravda 6 6 4 1 1 3 4 7 1 8 5 5
Rossiyskaya Gazeta 8 9 5 8 3 10 7 4 6 3 4 7
Kommersant 13 23 7 8 4 5 9 13 14 7 8 13
Gazeta.Ru 92 111 45 52 54 64 96 81 71 58 64 65
Lenta.Ru 79 99 71 50 90 82 105 66 75 58 62 96
I 198 248 132 119 152 164 221 171 167 134 143 186
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Table 8
'Conflict/Karabakh' pair frequencies (by periodical, by month)
PERIODICAL JAN FEB MAR APR MAY JUN JUL AUG SEP OCT NOV DEC
Komsomolskaya Pravda 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 2 28 16 7
Rossiyskaya Gazeta 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 3 13 22 9
Kommersant 0 0 0 0 0 0 7 1 5 28 13 12
Gazeta.Ru 2 1 2 2 1 2 16 3 108 399 169 57
Lenta.Ru 4 2 0 2 3 1 31 2 144 396 299 118
I 6 3 2 4 4 3 56 7 262 864 519 203
V
by Alina S. Antipova, Maria D. Rabeson and Olga V. Smirnova
5. DISCUSSION
The results of the experimental settings devoted to conflict terminology analysis show that the semantic field of contemporary conflict agenda within our study is extremely diverse. The current findings are the first step in the further research into socio-cultural media discourse within the frameworks of conflict terminology. In the future, we plan to conduct a deeper analysis of the semantic core, as well as identify and analyse semantic pairs formed by subject, geographic and other characteristics. Another possibility is a comparative analysis of the identified results with the current information agenda in the period under study.
6. CONCLUSION
The semantic field of conflict is multidimensional and miscellaneous. Territorial (geographical) and political aspects of conflict are the most regularly covered in all the periodicals under analysis. In addition to the general focus of the media on covering the conflict within territorial and political spheres, there is a certain focus of some publications on highlighting other conflict-related issues such as finance, law, the social sphere, family relations, education, culture, economics and criminal practice (forensic science). The regional relevance of publications is obvious due to the presence of Russian socio-cultural realities, with high frequen-
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FUNDING
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ALINA S. ANTIPOVA
Lomonosov Moscow State University | GSP-1, Leninskie Gory, 119991 Moscow, Russia
antipovaaline@gmail.com
MARIA D. RABESON
Lomonosov Moscow State University | GSP-1, Leninskie Gory, 119991 Moscow, Russia
maria.rabeson@gmail.com
OLGA V. SMIRNOVA
Lomonosov Moscow State University | GSP-1, Leninskie Gory, 119991 Moscow, Russia
smirnovaorama@gmail.com
