Класификација вредносног система новинског дискурса о епидемији коронавируса.

Зборник Матице српске за филологију и лингвистику. 2021. Vol. 64. No. 1. P. 131–145.

Trnavac R.

This paper investigates the news values (Bednarek –  Caple 2012; 2014; 2017) which are foregrounded in the specialized corpus of the newspaper articles on the COVID-19 pandemic.  The news values are seen as values that exist in and are constructed through discourse (Bednarek – Caple 2014). We collected our data from the Russian newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta in the period of October-December 2020. Our methodology included two stages: In the first stage, we singled out the top 100 most frequent words and 100 keywords by using the Wordsmith Tool. To obtain a list of keywords, we created a reference corpus -  a specialized corpus of a similar size as a source corpus with the news discourse in politics which did not include the topic of the pandemic. We then semantically annotated 200 words from both lists based on the USAS model (Archer et al. 2002), labeled them according to the discoursive fields of the USAS model, and classified them within the taxonomy of the news values that is based on the framework of the Discoursive News Values Analysis (Bednarek – Caple 2012; 2014; 2017). The above methods yielded the following results: The newspaper reporting on the coronavirus disease focused primarily on Superlativeness, Impact, and Proximity news values, while Personalization, Negativity, and Unexpectedness were backgrounded in the corpus. This means that the number of victims impacted by the disease, the territorial closeness where the victims were situated and the economic consequences of the crisis were in the spotlight of reporting that we analyzed.

 

Keywords: word frequency, news values, newspaper discourse, corpus semantic annotation, keywords analysis