Tatiana Melnichuk1 & Natalia Saburova2
1North-Eastern Federal University, melnichuk.ta@gmail.com, ORCID 0000-0002-8126-0925
2North-Eastern Federal University, natalya_saburova@inbox.ru, ORCID 0000-0002-9743-4862
Volume 13, Number 4, 2021 I Full-Text PDF
DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v13n4.53
Abstract
Media discourse is an effective tool for projecting and shaping the public perception of a certain idea or image. The article focuses on the linguistic and semantic representation of the concept “Black” in the American media discourse with a particular attention to how the concept representation has evolved from the 1990s to 2010s. The study employed corpus methodology (keyness, frequency, concordances) to analyze news articles from “The New York Times” and “The Los Angeles Times”, which were arranged into three corpora according to the publication date (1990s, 2000s, 2010s). The corpus analysis established a number of changes in the concept “Black” representation manifested primarily through the high relevance keywords and high frequency collocations. Dominant semantic components were identified in the concept representation in each corpus, as well as notable shifts in core and peripheral aspects within these semantic components. The analysis showed that although the semantic components ‘racial / ethnic inequality’ and ‘economic issues’ remain at the core of the concept in each corpus, they are expressed through connections with other semantic components which may vary throughout three decades, such as ‘culture’ in the 1990s, ‘education’ and ‘politics’ in the 2000s and ‘police brutality and profiling’ and ‘appearance’ in the 2010s.
Keywords: concept, black, representation, media discourse, keyness