The Construction of Ideological Meaning in Discourse: Lexical, Semantic, and Pragmatic Means
Abstract
This article examines the role of lexical, semantic, and pragmatic means in the construction of ideological meaning in political, media, and literary discourse. The study is based on a purposive qualitative corpus consisting of eight political speeches, six media texts covering the 2020 protests following the death of George Floyd, and seven literary works. The analysis addresses the representation of social actors, evaluative lexis, metaphor, modality, presupposition, implicature, and semantic polarization. The theoretical framework combines critical discourse analysis, Appraisal theory, conceptual metaphor, systemic-functional grammar, and pragmatics. The findings show that ideological meaning is not a fixed property of individual linguistic units but may be formed through their interaction within textual and social context. Media texts more prominently display varied forms of nomination of social actors, political speeches foreground collective identity and commitment, and literary discourse emphasizes evaluation and semantic contrast. The study demonstrates that the function of linguistic choices is determined by their use in specific communicative and social conditions. The comparison rests not on statistical frequencies but on the functional interpretation of selected examples. The limited and heterogeneous corpus does not allow the findings to be generalized to broader discourse domains.