LEXICAL FEATURES OF GERMAN MEDIA TEXTS ON THE TOPIC “WAR IN UKRAINE” IN THE CONTEXT OF MEDIA ECOLOGY

Abstract

The article analyzes the lexical features of media texts from German online publications on the topic “Krieg in der Ukraine”, because the highlighting of the events of the war in Ukraine has become one of the most relevant media topics and requires detailed study, in particular linguistic, considering that modern mass media play a decisive role in the attitude of a certain language community to certain events. The theoretical basis of the paper is the studies in the fields of media linguistics and media ecology which have an interdisciplinary character and are aimed at studying the means of linguistic influence as a significant factor in the formation of the worldview and linguistic consciousness of society. The main object of analysis is media texts as an open and universal multi-level category that reflects various aspects of society’s life, its information requests and pragmatic attitudes in verbal and extralingual way. Linguistic analysis of German online publications enables to establish their most characteristic lexical features: frequent use of proper names for the purpose of specifying and proving information (proper names of political figures of Ukraine and other countries, names of Ukrainian settlements where war events take place); indication of Ukrainian realities that specify the events; military vocabulary for visualizing of military events; lexical units that describe the realities of military operations and martial law; words and phrases that describe the terrible consequences of war; steady phrases of the journalistic style and phraseological units that highlight the description of events; ideological and modal vocabulary (lexical units with certain political and evaluative connotations); words and expressions with evaluative meaning; lexical compounds with new semantic nuances; synonyms. The distributional analysis of lexemes with the roots «ukr-» and «russ-» shows that the words Ukraine, Ukrainer, ukrainisch are combined with lexemes with neutral or positive semantics (59.6%), the words Russland, Russen, russisch correlate mainly with lexical units with negative staining (84.9%).