SEMANTIC STYLISTIC DEVICES IN NEWS TEXTS OF THE GUARDIAN ONLINE EDITION

Abstract

The article examines semantic stylistic devices in news texts of The Guardian online edition. The relevance of the topic is determined by the fact that contemporary digital news increasingly combines informative, interpretative, and persuasive functions. News in online media is no longer limited to the neutral presentation of facts. Instead, it appears as a communicatively organized text in which linguistic units participate in the semantic modeling of events, determine the angle of their perception, and shape the emotional background of the report. The aim of the study is to identify the most productive semantic stylistic devices in The Guardian news texts and to clarify their role in the organization of media reporting. The theoretical framework is based on contemporary works in media linguistics, stylistics, and discourse studies, where media discourse is treated as a multidimensional communicative space and stylistic devices are regarded not as decorative ornaments but as instruments of meaning construction, interpretation, and audience influence. The empirical material consists of ten news texts published by The Guardian in January and March 2026 in the sections World, Environment, Global Development, US News, and Technology. The research applies continuous sampling, contextual and interpretative analysis, stylistic analysis, and selected elements of discourse analysis. The article also clarifies the conceptual framework: metaphor, personification as a subtype of metaphor, metonymy, allusion, euphemization, and antithesis as a semantically organized figure of contrast are treated as the core semantic stylistic devices. Quotation-based dramatization, by contrast, is interpreted not as an independent semantic stylistic device but as an accompanying textual strategy that intensifies meaning. The analysis demonstrates that the most productive devices in the corpus are metaphor, personification, antithesis, euphemization, allusion, and metonymy. These devices function at the level of leads, authorial narration, reportage detail, direct quotations, and forms of reported speech. They provide not only expressiveness but also semantic focusing of the news report, intensify conflict, shape the interpretative frame of the event, and influence its reception. The findings make it possible to conclude that The Guardian news texts are characterized by a high level of semantic and stylistic organization and combine factual reporting with the active use of linguistic mechanisms of interpretation.