Mediatization of cognitive terms: A corpus study

Abstract

The problem of mediatization of cognitive terms in modern Russian socio-political media is considered. The study examines various approaches to the mediatization studies, which is comprehended at various levels: as a social process, discursive process, as well as the resulting transformation of lexemes in media texts. Thus, the mediatization of terms is considered as a consequence of global social and discursive processes, manifested in the semantic and pragmatic transformations of terms in the media. The object of the study is 22 terms that are relevant in scientific discourse and denote cognitive processes and phenomena, as well as approaches to their study. The functioning of the terms was studied on the material of 6704 contexts in the newspaper subcorpus of the National Corpus of the Russian Language. The aim of the study is to compare the semantics, pragmatic functions of cognitive terms in the media and scientific discourses, to identify factors that influence the features of mediatization of terms. To achieve this aim, N-grams, the frequency of use in media and scientific discourses were studied using the corpus statistics. The use of terms in the concordance lists of the NCRL were studied with semantic, contextual analysis. The semantics of terms in media texts is compared with the semantics in scientific discourse according to specialized dictionaries of cognitive terms. Discursive, pragmatic features of these lexemes are also analyzed to identify atypical functions, expressive contexts of use. As a result, the terms are divided into 4 groups depending on the characteristics of their use in media texts and the mediatization specific: 1) terms that are not mediatized; 2) terms with wider semantics in the media discourse; 3) terms that have differential semes in comparison with scientific discourse; 4) terms that function in non-standard combinations, expressive contexts.