A corpus analysis of the representation of war in Ukraine in the international press

Abstract

This paper explored the representation of war in Ukraine, utilizing corpus linguistics methods. It presents the gleanings of the analysis of the international press release covering the period February 24th - November 1st, based on a specialized corpus (1 081 971 tokens) of world newspaper articles compiled for this study. Using the LancsBox software package, a keyword analysis was carried out, providing a window into lexical patterns and typical themes associated with the war in Ukraine. The study highlighted the quantitative characteristics of the target corpus by singling out keywords and their collocates, followed by a qualitative interpretation of their usage in context. The themes commonly referenced in the target corpus were as follows: military intervention, actors/agents, implements, consequences, victims, description and attitudes, resistance, and economy. On the paradigmatic level, the highest occurrences were documented for lexemes war, invasion, and conflict as referents to the concept of ongoing warfare. On the syntagmatic level, lexically rich were the themes of attitudes towards war and its influence on the global economy. Negative discourse prosodies were evident in the discussion of war and some of its agents. In sum, the paper helps understand public attitudes and evaluation of war in the news coverage, which shape the image of Ukraine in the global arena.