What’s in a “War”? A Corpus-Assisted Comparative Study on (De)legitimizing Linguistic Labels of the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict in Romanian and English-Language Media
摘要
This chapter explores Romanian and English-language media coverage of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict between 2022 and 2024 in order to establish and compare the inventory of uses of such terms as “war,” “conflict,” “invasion,” “aggression,” “military operation,” “demilitarization,” and “denazification” together with their frequencies and contextual distributions. By drawing on the notions of (de)legitimization through evaluation (as well as proximization), the study expands on quantitative and collocational analyses by noting the main similarities, differences, and temporal trends in the use of selected linguistic labels. It also discusses the ideological implications of the uses of certain linguistic labels in the explicit or implicit indexing of Romanian and English-language media outlets’ pro-Ukrainian and pro-European stances. In this, the chapter develops the model of (de)legitimization by drawing attention to the lexical level of recontextualization.