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Strike, accident, risk, and counter-factuality: hidden meanings of the post-Soviet Russian news discourse of the 1990s via conceptual blending*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 April 2014

ANNA PLESHAKOVA
ANNA PLESHAKOVA*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
*
†e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Drawing upon Paul Chilton’s (2005) approach to manipulative discourse analysis, this paper looks into how the ideas of risk and blame, as shifted from Yeltsin and his team of ‘reformers’ in the pursuit of restoring Yeltsin’s political credibility, were propagated through the media news management during the presidential election of 1996. By applying the Conceptual Integration or Blending framework (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) to a case study of the Russian news story about an airport strike, the paper reveals how the mass media was manipulated at an almost invisible level, which has not been explored so far. The paper argues that conceptual integration can be successfully used as a core cognitive linguistic research method for elucidating culturally specific and historically changing cognitive frames and analysis of counter-factuality in manipulative news discourse.

Keywords

conceptual blendingdiscourse analysiscounter-factualitymanipulationcultural modelsframes
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 6 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 301 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

I am grateful to Paul Chilton and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on this paper. I am also grateful to Mark Turner, Gilles Fauconnier, and Christopher Hart for commenting on the conference presentations of the paper.

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