Browsing by Subject "Russo-Ukrainian War"

This thesis tackles the topic of the Russo-Ukrainian War to unveil the representation of Ukraine in British newspapers following the Russian invasion in 2022. In addition to analysing the representation of Ukraine, this study also makes preliminary observations on the representation of a few other social actors in the war, such as Russia and the UK. It does so by synthesising corpus methods, APPRAISAL theory (Martin & White, 2005), and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in search of patterns in the data. The data was sampled from the News on the Web (NOW) corpus (Davies, 2016-) and includes newspaper articles that: a) include the lemma UKRAINE; b) originate from the UK; and c) date from one of three selected weeks following the invasion in 2022. The three subcorpora – one for each selected week – were assessed with corpus methods as well as employed for a random selection of 15 texts which were subsequently used in the APPRAISAL analysis element of the study. The thesis’s findings suggest that the presence of and discussion around Ukraine in the UK press changes over the course of the year after the invasion. Furthermore, the APPRAISAL analysis revealed a clear distinction between appraisals of Ukraine, Russia, and the UK, the dynamic between which also changed over time. The overall majority of evaluations of Ukraine in the texts (54.6%) was negative, as was the far larger majority (84.9%) of evaluations of Russia. A more in-depth analysis elucidated a distinction between these negative appraisals. Ukraine’s negative evaluations pertained largely to the APPRAISAL categories of SECURITY, IMPACT and QUALITY, denoting an emphasis on the negative situation Ukraine finds itself in. The country is described as, among other things, war-torn and blown to bits. Negative evaluations of Russia, on the other hand, stemmed predominantly from the VALUATION, PROPRIETY and IMPACT categories, emphasising the unethical behaviour of (representatives of) Russia, its negative role in the conflict, and its negative impact on other social actors. Overall, the findings suggest that throughout the British news, Ukraine is represented as a victim and object of others’ actions and Russia as an unethical aggressor.