Verbytska A. The Concept DISTRESS in English Media Discourse: Cognitive and Communicative Aspects

The paper focuses on linguistic, cognitive, and communicative qualities of the concept DISTRESS. It aims at revealing and analyzing the linguistic units which verbalize this concept in English media discourse. The analysis of data employs findings of linguistics of emotions, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and communicative linguistics. The major scientific methods are contextual, conceptual, quantitative, discourse and content analysis. The scientific novelty of the research is determined by culture-specific nature of DISTRESS concept. The paper seeks to reconstruct a cognitive structure of the concept DISTRESS, reveal a range of conceptual metaphors; develop a typology of socially oriented communicative situations of distress; define participants and socio-cultural values with the help of Textanz software in English media discourse; distinguish communicative tactics and strategies. The method of statistical content analysis based on SentiStrength 2.2. software was first developed to establish the tonality of lexical means which verbalise the concept DISTRESS in a particular situation. The theoretical significance of the work lies in the fact that its principles and findings contribute to the development of discourse, media linguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguistics of emotions. The practical value of the obtained results lies in the possibility to apply them in teaching stylistics of English language (theme ‘Stylistic Differentiation of English Language’), courses in media linguistics, discourse theory, cognitive linguistics, political linguistics, psycholinguistics.