Lexicon of news genres in the media: corpus analysis based on Russian and Spanish languages

The subject of research in this article is the most frequent vocabulary of news messages in Russian- and Spanish-speaking mass media. The characteristics of the language of mass communication in recent decades have attracted the interest of both domestic and foreign researchers, who, in particular, highlight the informational substyle within it. It is noted that media texts are largely oriented towards fulfilling the key function of mass communication – informing their audience. This primarily pertains to news genres, which are built on promptness and accuracy while extensively using neutral commonplace vocabulary that makes the text accessible to a broad range of readers. The aim of the analysis was to compare the identified semantic groups of nouns and adjectives based on the materials from the corpora of the National Corpus of Russian Language (NKRЯ) and the CORPES RAE. The method and methodology of the research include the analysis of the 200 most frequent nouns and 100 adjectives recorded in the national corpora of both languages for each of the considered time periods (2010, 2015, 2020). A total of 1,800 lexical units were examined. The study also employed quantitative methods, classification methods, and comparative analysis. The novelty of this corpus-based study lies in the comparative analysis of the two languages (Russian and Spanish), which aimed to identify universal patterns in the formation of the lexical composition of informational messages in mass media. The work conducted allowed for the identification of 12 main semantic groups in the category of nouns and 4 groups in the category of adjectives. The collected material confirmed the initial assumption about the predominantly neutral, stylistically unmarked nature of the vocabulary used in news messages in both Russian and Spanish languages. Despite some specific discrepancies, there is a significant overlap in the lexical composition of the examined substyle of mass communication language in both countries, which aligns with the trend noted by researchers towards the unification of media language.