The concept "The Troubles": research methodology and representation in literary and media discourses

This paper is devoted to the cross disciplinary research of The Troubles. The abovementioned political and religious confrontation, being one of the most longstanding in Irish and British history, is analyzed across the issues of linguistic and literary studies. The methods applied are those of cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics. The novelty of the approach is in an attempt to describe The Troubles as a concept in uniting media and literary discourses. The novels (R.M. Wilson's Eurika Street, S. Deane's Reading in the Dark, G. Patterson's The International) and The Irish Times (rubric "Opinions", 1996, 245 texts) are chosen for the research. 1996 is chosen as one of the acute moments of the standoff for the reason of ceasefire cessation. The paper provides theoretical underpinning for the approaches to terminology used, describes the developed methodology and presents the results for the media discourse analysis. In this research discourse is understood as a complex communicative-cognitive issue capturing both texts and extra linguistic factors. The authors consider the novels and newspapers to be essentials of the whole issue rhetoric, understanding media and literary discourses as parts of public discourse. The concept "The Troubles" is understood as a dynamic structured cognition of the idea of ethno-political, religious and territorial relations between Catholics and Protestants in the Northern Ireland unambiguously perceived by the recipients as a conflict. The first methodological step of the research is definitional analysis of "The Troubles". It resulted in grouping its cognitive criteria: Political Organizations, Political Orientation, War, Religion, Authorities, Election, Media, Peace, People, Place, Conversation. The second step is building the core and the periphery of the concept using AntConc3.2.4w software and principles of corpus linguistics. The third is analyzing language features of "The Troubles" nominative field. The final step is describing cultural and evaluating particularity of the language features described. The authors concluded that the ideas of conflicting parts exclusiveness are in the core of the concept, with Participants and Places of the events substantially presented. However, the cognitive criteria, sociocultural markers, characterized by striving for peaceful reconcilement of counterparts should not be underestimated, for they build the basis for the concept language representation upsides with the main cognitive criteria. The Irish Times in its entirety upholds a rather neutral presentation of "The Troubles", while in the literary discourse the situation may be adverse. The investigated time period and the only rubric "Opinions" restrict the research. The media discourse is much more diverse. But these restrictions make it possible to proceed with describing the evaluative features of the concept as well as with investigating other media materials, for example, movies.

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