Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Analysts of the Russian Reporter magazine having examined popular political vocabulary of recent years revealed a new interpretation of the traditional semantics of war, state, democracy, class, nationalism, right, revolution, market, freedom and church concepts. The new meanings of traditional concepts in relation to the concepts of media sphere researchers point at the nature of the political consciousness of modern Russian society. Methods: The essence of the actual problem defines the approaches applied to the study. A content analysis method (target sampling from three editions) was used at the quantitative level. A combination of attitudinal analysis and a modified method of critical discourse analysis (CDA) was employed at the quantitative level. By connecting techniques, firstly, we depart from fixing attention on the syntax in favor of the detailed study of the selected concepts’ semantics traditional for many studies within CDA; secondly, instead of the concept of the “norm” traditional for CDA, we draw attention to the academically established meanings which is promoted by the use of elements of the linguistic study of the semantic shift. Thus, methodologically the work is a combination of content analysis, attitudinal analysis and critical discourse analysis. Findings: - Dynamics of meanings of different concepts is asynchronous; - due to asynchrony the dynamics of meanings correlates with the degree of the concept abstractedness; - the process of transition from the attitudinal instability of the concepts to their attitudinal certainty is recorded. Application/Improvements: A further expansion of samples will allow considering the dynamics of the media semantics in relation to the political orientation of the publication. 

Keywords:Attitudinal Media Analysis, Media Concept, Media Interpretation, Semantic Dynamics, Understanding in Journalism