Ukrainian perspectives on the Self, the EU and Russia: an intersemiotic analysis of Ukrainian newspapers (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cognition, Communication, Discourse. International on-line scholarly journal, 2018
This special issue presents findings of the transnational research project “Crisis, Conflict and Critical Diplomacy: EU Perceptions in Ukraine, Israel and Palestine” (C3EU) (2015-2018) focusing on Ukraine-specific results. Articles by researchers from Ukraine, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom combine approaches of cognitive and communicative linguistics with the provisions of communication and media studies, cultural studies, political science, studies of international relations and European integration.
Images of Ukraine—EU relations in conceptual metaphors of Ukrainian mass media
Cognition, communication, discourse, No 17,. 118–140., 2018
This paper discusses the system of conceptual metaphors reconstructed via analysis of metaphorical expressions (ME) employed by eight popular Ukrainian newspapers (Holos Ukrainy, Uriadovyi Kurier, Den', Dzerkalo Tyzhnya, Gazeta Po-Ukrains'ky, Segodnya, Ukraina Moloda, and Kommmentarii) published in January – June, 2016. The ME describe perceptions of the EU, Ukraine, and their cooperation in the target conceptual spaces of POLITICS and ECONOMY. The data are processed according to an authentic methodology applicable to multiple metaphorical expressions [Zhabotynska 2013a; 2013b; 2016]. Grounded on the findings of Conceptual Metaphor Theory [Lakoff and Johnson 1980], this methodology represents an algorithm for exposure and further description of conceptual metaphors applied in a thematically homogeneous discourse, and manifested by multiple ME. Their analysis, aiming to portray some metaphorical system as a whole, provides an in-depth study of its target and source conceptual spaces and an empirically rigorous account of their cross-mapping influenced by the discourse type. In this study focused on mass media political discourse, the reconstructed system of conceptual metaphors demonstrates Ukraine’s stance on its relations with the EU and contributes to understanding the role of political metaphor as a mind-shaping device. Keywords: political images, the EU, Ukraine, Ukrainian newspapers, conceptual metaphor, multiple data, methodology.
New Zealand Slavonic Journal. 2019-2020, vol. 53-54, p. 147-172
This article contributes to the burgeoning field of the study of emotions in politics. Admitting the difficulty to assess emotions directly, we track emotions through verbal and visual representations available in political narratives, and media narratives in particular. In our focus are visual images (cartoons and photographs) contributing to the Russian media narratives on Ukraine. Our research case deals with the coverage of EU-Ukraine agreement on Ukraine’s visa-free entry to the Schengen zone by the Russian popular e-news portals in 2017 (sample of 108 visual images). We question potential influence of emotive messaging on long-lasting perceptions of Ukraine in Russia in the context of the ongoing conflict and employ the image continuum of ‘difference’ – ‘otherness’ – ‘enmity’ to understand the particular link between emotions and othering. We find visual imagery demarcates the boundaries between the Russian Self and Ukrainian Otherness, and risks long-lasting effects on perceptions and understandings, which will continue to feed into diagnosis of the ongoing conflict, and to influence the behaviour and relations around it. Key words: Ukraine, Russia, the European Union (EU), visa-free entry to the Schengen zone, visual images, emotions
Framing of European integration in Ukrainian media discourse
The topic of European integration is one of the most important for Ukrainian political discourse and reflects the main controversy in politics and society. This paper is based on a case study: how are European integration and widely the idea of Europe conceptualized in Ukrainian political discourses and how are they presented and framed in the Ukrainian press in the period 2005–2010? What are the dominant frames in the representation of European integration in the Ukrainian press? This study demonstrates that conceptualization of European integration and, connected with it, the foreign policy choice of Ukraine is proceeding in the Ukrainian media discourse with usage of the following dominant frames: geopolitical confrontation, civilizational choice and an instrument of inner changes.
Synecdoche, Metonymy or Metaphor: How the Press in Ukraine, Poland and Russia Sees Europe?
The recent developments in Ukraine known as Euromaidan or Eurorevolution pushed to the foreground the problem of what Europe is for its East and how it is seen there. This paper points out to how various narratives of Europe have inhabited media discourses in Ukraine during the 2013-2014 mass protests, also taken in a comparative perspective with Poland and Russia. The three are the counties that, given their multiple differences and similarities in their histories, cultures and social structures, make an almost ideal case for comparison (just as their relations have been defining to the structure of the region). The scholars of Central and Eastern Europe have also long noticed that the place of Europe in post-Cold War national mythologies of different countries varies widely. In perhaps the most dramatic examples, Poland rethought itself as "the somehow decentred heart of Catholic Europe" (Dayan & Katz, 1994, p. 166), while Russia gave reasons to conclude it "leaves the West" (Trenin, 2006, p. 87) and Ukraine stuck with its view of Europe as a normative example (Orlova, 2010). This paper will present the results of qualitative analysis based on an open coding approach that discerns different narratives of Europe in the media discourses of the Polish, Russian and Ukrainian press. The focus of the analysis rests primarily on the most important and prestigious news outlets (Rzeczpospolita and Gazeta wyborcza in Poland; Novaya gazeta and Kommersant in Russia; Dzerkalo tyzhnia and Korrespondent in Ukraine) but also includes the most prestigious online blog platforms where opinion leaders set the principal frames for narrating Europe; such as Ukraine's most read blogs section at Ukrayins'ka Pravda, Russia's Snob.ru and Poland's Natemat.pl. This will arguably give a more panoramic overview of what could be thought of as the three countries' public discourses. The key idea originating from this analysis is that in the analyzed papers the word "Europe", overloaded with multiple meanings, functions as a semantically empty figure of speech; Europe is not "what", it is "how". Broadly speaking, it is most likely a metonymy in which something is called by the name of something else that is closely associated with it instead of being called by the name of its own. For Poland, a part of the EU, this part can more easily substitute the whole in a synecdoche (which is often seen as a form of metonymy): it typically generalizes particular European countries to represent entire Europe. Ukraine's press prefers more conventional metonymy, using Europe as shorthand for the values and practices it sees as important, useful and vital for its own survival, just because the values originated in Europe and are associated with it. Russia pushes the limits of metonymy further to the brink of metaphor where anything at all can substitute for anything else, therefore facilitating the construction of the stories of decline-and-fall or epic battle that are metaphoric if hyperbolic in nature. Keywords: Europe, Ukraine, Poland, Russia, press
Emotive lexicon of the political narrative: Ukraine and the West in Cinese media
Cognition, Communication, Discourse, 2022
This study, done within the framework of political and cognitive linguistics, discusses emotively loaded language of political media narratives that serve as the major manipulative tool with which propaganda exerts ideological impact on the public. Among various linguistic devices employed in molding the political narrative, a conspicuous role is played by emotively loaded lexicon that is in focus of this inquiry. It aims to expose the contribution of emotively loaded words into featuring a media image of the war launched by Russia against Ukraine in February, 2022. As a result of ideological confrontation between the adversaries and between their allies, this image, targeting home audiences in Russia and Ukraine, as well as foreign audiences, is framed as either pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian, with the respective emotive assessments being mostly contrastive. Our study considers a pro-Russian image of the war shaped by the English version of The Global Times popular tabloid that belongs to Chinese state media. The dataset includes the articles depicting the Russia-Ukraine war in the context of international relations. The articles were published during June, 2022, three months after the beginning of Russia's military assault. In the study, the analysis of emotive lexicon grounds on a cognitive ontology of the RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR image. Such ontology, defined as event-focused, allows for structuring information about the event proper and its participants. Their verbally crafted 'portraits' are made salient through the scope of employed emotive expressions, which facilitates priming and entrenchment of the intended biased image in the reader's mind.
The paper sets out to examine the metaphoricity of mediatized political discourse, particularly, news reports dealing with the conflict between Ukraine and Russia in its initial stage, from November 2013 to February 2014, as reflected in Lithuanian and Polish online press. The methodology of research relies on the principles of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Metaphor Identification Procedure (see Steen et al. 2010) and metaphorical patterns (Stefanowitsch 2004). Metaphorical expressions were identified in contexts surrounding three main content words identified with the AntConc (Anthony 2014) programme in Lithuanian and Polish corpus: Kyiv, Ukraine and Maidan. The results suggest that in the mediatized political discourse, these place-names are usually conceptualized as an animal or, more frequently, as a person, experiencing difficulties, suffering, feeling lost, angry, also ready to fight and able to make decisions and act independently. Another image is that of a traveller to Europe, an almost mythical destination, which is reflected in metaphorical expressions and the newly emerging compound Euromaidan. Another, slightly less numerously represented, tendency is concerned with Kyiv, Ukraine and Maidan conceptualized as objects and institutions. They include containers for (hot) fluid, a chiming bell, a toy, garbage, theatre, school, etc. Most metaphors employed in the texts are evaluative. Culture-specific features in conceptualizing events in Ukraine are mostly concerned with some deeply entrenched images, like furrows and rural life in Lithuanian, and positing Poland as Ukraine’s ally and friend in Polish.
Mediated Europes: Discourse and Power in Ukraine, Russia and Poland during Euromaidan
Södertörn University, 2017
This study focuses on mediated representations of Europe during Euromaidan and the subsequent Ukraine–Russia crisis, analysing empirical material from Ukraine, Poland and Russia. The material includes articles from nine newspapers, diverse in terms of political and journalistic orientation, as well as interviews with journalists, foreign policymakers and experts, drawing also on relevant policy documents as well as online and historical sources. The material is examined from the following vantage points: Michel Foucault’s discursive theory of power, postcolonial theory, Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and Ernesto Laclau’s concept of the empty signifier. The methods of analysis include conceptual history (Reinhart Koselleck), critical linguistics and qualitative discourse analysis (a discourse-historical approach inspired by the Vienna school) and quantitative content analysis (in Klaus Krippendorff’s interpretation). Historically, the national narratives of Europe in the aforementioned three countries are characterised by dependence on the West that also sparks periods of its rejection. These narratives vacillate between three major poles: idealising admiration, materialist pragmatics and geopolitical demonising. They are not exclusively endemic to one country and have been present in each to some extent. However, weaker actors have tended to lean towards the idealist side because Europe is perceived as a source of important technological and social know-how. Authors in all three countries struggled with defining Europe’s limits, and whilst this problem be- came intertwined with their own identification, Europeanness is typically constructed as a shock wave fading as it travels eastward from an epicentre located somewhere in north-western Europe. These discourses were reactivated and developed in 2013–2014. In the analysed newspapers, Europe is often understood as a continent (most often in Poland) or identified with the EU (Russia and Ukraine), but there is also a strong pattern of using Europe in reference to values which is weakest in Poland and strongest in Ukraine. Ideologically, the liberal publications in all three countries focus on positive values, whereas the conservative and business newspapers are preoccupied with negative values. Among the posi- tive values, the humanistic ones dominate the Ukrainian newspapers, and the rationalist-technocratic are typical in the Russian sample. The Ukrainian press account for most of the positive coverage of a successful Europe, whereas the Russian press provide most of the negative coverage (Europe as a failing entity and an enemy). Ukrainian and Russian discourses differ sharply on whether the country should adopt European reforms (Ukraine) or not (Russia). The Polish coverage is polarised between positive and negative values. During and after Euromaidan, Ukrainian journalists used the powerful Europe-as-values concept to actively intervene in the political field and re- contextualise this narrative of Europe as the official foreign policy narrative. This was enabled, paradoxically, by weak professionalism that made a wavering from a neutral stance possible. Compared to this, in Russia the strong discourse on journalist objectivity constrained journalists in their social practice; rather, it is the official discourse that is recontextualised by the media. Polish journalists, ambiguous about their own influence, work in a loop that recontextualises discourses from the media sphere to the political field and vice versa.
Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, 2022
Personification, one of major types of metaphors often employed to express an attitude, is also an argumentative tool, especially in media texts on politically contested events. The present investigation aims at disclosing the attitudinal stance in personifying Ukraine, Russia, the Western countries and Lithuania in a corpus of texts collected from Lithuanian media in 2015-2018. The study relies on the three-step Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA, Charteris-Black 2004), involving three levels: linguistic, cognitive and rhetorical. More specifically, they include (1) identifying personification cases, (2) interpreting personification through cognitive metaphorical scenarios (Musolff 2016), and (3) explaining ideological implications encoded in the scenarios. The findings indicate that in the scenario of COMMUNICATION, Ukraine is mostly presented positively: active defender and in need of support, with occasional scepticism whether it is capable to change. The West, Lithuania including, is presented as a supporter, whereas Russia is viewed as a negatively evaluated antagonist.