Binary opposition 'us/them' in British and American media texts about conflicts

The article addresses configurations, which embody interaction between the constituents of the axiological opposition "us/them" in the British and American discourse of media. The research objective is to identify the configuration patterns and describe peculiarities of the evaluative interaction of " ours" and " theirs". The empirical corpus incorporates 1200 English news reports and feature articles, representing the conflict situation and selected from UK and US newspapers. A number of research methods have been applied, among which are discourse analysis, semantic analysis, contextual analysis, comparative analysis, quantitative analysis. The types of conflicts, which are addressed in British and American media texts of different genres, have been identified. Most of the selected media texts cover foreign policy conflicts (80% in British publications and 60% in the American ones). The modern media agenda concentrates on external conflicts in order to divert the attention of the linguocultural community from domestic problems. Different types of 'evaluators' were singled out in British and American media texts about conflicts. The interaction between the "us/them" opposition constituents is determined by the 'evaluator', who can be a journalist--the author of the article, acting as a narrator/an observer; a character of the article--the author of the quotation containing assessment; or a collective author, i.e. the editorial board, a party, people, community. The configurational models of the axiological interaction of "us" and "them " in British and American media texts on conflict topics have been considered. 8 logically possible patterns of interaction between "ours" and " theirs" as components of the axiological opposition "us/them" were singled out. The most frequent configuration model in the selected media texts of both genres is X [right arrow]--Y. The Ximpl [right arrow] + Y configuration pattern is the least representative in both genres. Keywords: Conflict, Discourse of Media, Evaluation, Media Text, Opposition