LEXICO-SEMANTIC FEATURES OF THE REPRESENTATION OF THE WAR IN UKRAINE BY MASS MEDIA (BASED ON BBC AND CNN NEWS)

Abstract

In the modern society mass media cover the various events, including military conflicts. The politicians, journalists and ordinary citizens often use military vocabulary, and this phenomenon is no longer limited to the description of the special area, this type of vocabulary has entered into everyday use. The purpose of the study is the analysis and classification of the military vocabulary in the context of the English-language news describing military events in Ukraine. The article analyzes the lexical units that verbalize the events of wartime. The object of the research is the news texts on military topics. The article characterizes the groups of the lexical units identified by the continuous sampling method from the BBC and CNN news, namely the material about the war in Ukraine. The brief overview of the linguistic research on the language of war has been given. The impact of non-linguistic factors on the lexical structure of the language has been shown. The examples of the most popular Ukrainian neologisms in the English language, which appeared during 2022–2023 against the background of military operations, have been considered. The following thematic groups are highlighted: the phenomena of the Ukrainian realities; the names of combat weapons; the description of combat operations; the daily life of the Ukrainian refugees; the diplomatic front; volunteering; information front; the words and phrases glorifying Ukraine. The largest group consists of the words describing the realities of the Ukrainian wartime, as well as the lexical units that name the different types of weapons. The third place among the analyzed vocabulary is occupied by the units connected with the life of the Ukrainan refugees. In the course of the study, it became clear that in the Englishlanguage news, the units to denote weapons began to appear more and more often, and such vocabulary has taken the second place in the analyzed mass media texts. The study proves the connection between language and society. The historical stages of the society development are reflected in the lexical system. The language of mass media reacts quite quickly to the lexical innovations. The English-language mass media have a separate section for the news that reflects the war in Ukraine and it is characterized by the high intensity of the military vocabulary, which includes both military terms and common words. The neologisms that arose in the Ukrainian language are also reflected in the language of the foreign mass media. This indicates the interest of the world community in the problem in Ukraine.