The Concept “War” in Contemporary British and American Media Discourse: Linguistic and Social Features

The paper is devoted to in-depth analysis of the concept “war” in contemporary British and American media, focusing on the linguistic framing and its social features in The Guardian and Politico over the period from February 2022 to November 2024. Through a cognitive linguistic lens, this study identifies the ideological, ethical, and political implications embedded in the language used to describe the Russia-Ukraine war. The paper highlights the contrasting perspectives in British and American discourse through analysing collocations, syntactic structures, and semantic prosody. The concept “war” is defined with due regard to the works of leading language scholars. In the course of research, we discovered that frequent emphasizing of the humanitarian and global implications, framing the concept “war” within a context of democratic values versus authoritarianism, is peculiar for British media, while American media frames it as a geopolitical and strategic issue. The findings of our study revealed the ways the linguistic choices of media shape public perception, underscore ideological narratives, and reflect broader cultural and political values. Moreover, both The Guardian and Politico are found to utilize such linguistic mechanisms as collocational patterns, syntactic structures, and ideological framing to describe war both as a military engagement and a multifaceted, dynamic phenomenon with profound moral, political, and humanitarian implications. Thus, the research underscores the role of language in constructing the public understanding of complex geopolitical events.