Set phrases with the component war in modern media discourse

Since the late 1990s, set nominal phrases (usually consisting of two words, hereinafter referred to as SNPs) having the word war in their structure and denoting types of interstate conflicts have significantly enriched Russian-language media discourse. For instance, we can give such linguistic units as examples: gibridnaya v. / English hybrid w. , oposredovannaya v. / English proxy w. , setevaya v. / English network w. , mentalnaya v. / English mental w. , v. chuzhimi rukami / English proxy w. , beskontaktnaya v. / English non-contact warfare , v. po doverennosti / English proxy w. , konventsional naya v . / English conventional warfare , kognitivnaya v . / English cognitive warfare , tsivilizatsionnaya v . / English civilisational warfare , distantsionnaya v . / remote warfare , setetsentrichnaya v . / network centric warfare , and others. The process is due to significant changes in the theory and practice of modern warfare. The novelty of the study consists in the lexical semantic analysis of those current word combinations of this structure which are not yet codified in dictionaries. The relevance is determined by the topicality of these naming units in Russian-language mass media, as well as by the lack of their systematic linguistic description. The article aims to identify the range of SNPs (containing the component war in their structure) denoting the names of modern wars that are different from traditional ones and currently significant for Russian-language media landscape. The goals are to: 1) determine the number of units comprising this group; 2) determine the mechanism of their appearance in Russian-language mass media; 3) characterise the semantic and stylistic features of these units; 4) consider the prospects for their codification in dictionaries; 5) trace how the semantics of the word war changes when it becomes part of set phrases. The research material (about 50 linguistic units) was obtained from the Integrum database, Google and Yandex resources. The study used descriptive, componential, and functional analysis. The authors come to the following conclusions: compound names of new interstate conflict types form a noticeable group in the language of modern Russian-language mass media. These are predominantly borrowings from American military and political terminology going beyond the scope of special terminology which is not sufficiently standardised. The changing nature of modern interstate conflicts, as denoted by such SNPs, has led to a meaning extension of the word war . In Russian mass media texts, there is a discrepancy in explaining the SNPs with the component war , as well as in understanding their genus-species relations, which requires in-depth linguistic research.