LINGUISTIC PECULIARITIES OF DELIVERING INFORMATION ABOUT UKRAINE AND THE RUSSIAN-UKRAINIAN WAR WITHIN THE TEXTS OF THE WESTERN MASS MEDIA

Abstract

The paper analyses articles in online newspapers and publications on social networks, which reveal an understanding of how the world sees Ukraine and the power of mass media influencing public opinion during the war in Ukraine. For a better understanding of the author's motives and the military situation in the country, linguistic semantic analysis and analysis of linguistic interpretation were applied to search for hidden meanings of the authors’ statements used in scientific articles. When implicitness is noticed, linguistic semantic analysis is used to find hidden meanings in the text in order to make it clearer. It has also been vital to establish the differences between newspapers and social media because those texts can be different with their specific way of rendering information and semantics that is put in them. Since the 24th of February, 2022, the name of Ukraine has been a great phenomenon. A lot of articles in online newspapers and posts on social media have been written. There are a lot of examples how Ukraine was shown in that kind of texts. It is necessary to analyze them when trying to understand how the world sees Ukraine and power of impact that mass media has on society’s opinion. Nowadays, because of information that can be found online, it became easy for people to receive news, facts, and other needed things. This huge amount of information that people deal with from day to day has enormous impact on society’s life. They contain information that forms people’s vision of certain events, people, situations. One of such situations is the current war in Ukraine. Since its beginning, it has been one of the most relevant topics in the modern world. The war has been constantly discussed in global mass media. Such articles are written in order to inform people about the war and that whole situation. Editors need to make information clear for people who are not specialists in politics. And sometimes these articles and posts can be very manipulative and a little far from reality, which can have a huge impact on people’s minds. They are used by propagandists and their purpose is to form, or in some cases to change, society’s opinion about something.