Modelling. the Discursive Reality of the Global Crisis: the Experience of Media Representation of the Covid-19 Pandemic

The study is devoted to the study of cognitive mechanisms, communicative techniques and means of modeling the discursive reality of the global crisis in the linguistic consciousness of native speakers of English and Chinese in projection on the specifics of representation of the COVID-19 pandemic in official and oppositional mass media institutions. The linguistic analysis is focused on polycode means of communication: verbal units associated with elements of linguocultural semiotics. During the study the author puts forward the hypothesis that the linguistic and cognitive model of the global crisis is formed by conceptualizing in the linguistic consciousness of the mass addressee opposite ideological attitudes in the conditions of contrasting discursive dynamics. The verification of the research hypothesis is based on the results of the linguistic analysis of empirical material in Chinese and English with an emphasis on the quantitative analysis of contrasting corpuses of texts. The author also focuses on the description of the key narratives of the pandemic period from the perspectives of both linguistics and linguosemiotics, including image perception. The obtained conclusions indicate that the technology of discursive modeling of global crises is a complex process of synchronized application of a set of communicative techniques, polycode means and multimodal channels of implementation of discursive influence in direct and hidden forms in order to reconceptualize the images of perception of reality.