Conceptual Integration of Contextual Synonyms in Contemporary English Media Discourse
Iryna KAZYMIR et al.
What the paper says
Contextual synonymy plays a significant role in contemporary media discourse by shaping semantic emphasis and emotional framing through figurative lexical choices. While previous research has examined metaphorical and evaluative language within individual domains, systematic cross-discursive comparisons remain limited. This study investigates the mechanisms underlying the creation and functioning of contextual synonyms in medical, political, and sports media texts and analyses their pragmatic role in structuring meaning within contemporary English media discourse. The analysis draws on qualitative content analysis supplemented by discourse-analytical interpretation and descriptive statistics. The corpus comprises 300 texts from five British newspapers (The Guardian, The Telegraph, Daily Mail, Mirror, and The Sun). A total of 325 instances of contextual synonyms were manually identified and coded: 120 in medical discourse, 95 in political discourse, and 110 in sports discourse. Contextual synonyms were operationalised as lexical items or multi-word expressions that substitute more neutral terms while introducing evaluative, metaphorical, or imagistic meaning. The units were classified into four functional-semantic categories: military vocabulary, zoomorphic images, strength/endurance images, and cognitive-psychological images. The findings demonstrate systematic cross-discursive variation. Medical discourse is dominated by military metaphors framing health issues as crises requiring mobilisation. Political discourse relies extensively on zoomorphic and cognitive-psychological imagery that stabilises moral evaluation and reinforces ideological polarisation. Sports discourse privileges strength and animal metaphors that contribute to heroisation and spectacle. The study concludes that contextual synonymy functions as a higher-order framing mechanism linking lexical choice, emotional valence, and discursive strategy. By proposing a unified functional-semantic model, the research offers a framework for analysing evaluative language across media domains and provides a basis for further cross-linguistic and cross-cultural investigation.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.