DOI 10.51955/23121327_2022_2_77

Andrey G. Fomin

Elizaveta S. Trofimova

Abstract. The article reveals the analysis of lexical means containing evaluation of military-political conflicts in Chinese mass media. As a result of continuous sampling, the authors picked out 250 texts devoted to military-political conflicts and pinpointed 248 thematically relevant words and word combinations, having connotation in their semantic structure. If during the first period (1990-2013) Chinese mass media used mainly modal verbs to express advice and parentheses to refer to the source of information in relation to military-political discourse, during the second period (2014-2022) the choice of words which are used to inform people about the conflict has changed considerably. Evaluative semes were identified after the definition analysis of the obtained lexical units. The lexical units used by Chinese mass media have explicit negative connotation. Often they are used as conflictogenes as applying them China explicitly condemns the parties to a conflict and / or the superpowers standing behind the conflict. The texts are abundant in evaluative words, which helps to produce strong pragmatic influence on the addressee of the message. As for the parts of speech these words belong to, the most frequent ones are the verbs and nouns derived from them. Such a tendency helps to show the dynamic nature of the conflict. The second most frequent group is descriptive adjectives used in comparative and superlative constructions. This lexical units allow the media to reflect the tension of the conflict and create a bright image. Besides, to enhance their influence on the target audience, the media utilize multiple metaphors, which, again, contain evaluative words. 

Key words: evaluativity category, military-political discourse, conflictogene, connotation, mass media discourse, military-political conflict, Chinese media, conflict, evaluative vocabulary, evaluative component.

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