Linguistic representation of natural disasters in media coverage

Nowadays natural disasters affect the lives of thousands of people living all over the world. However, the complexity of the processes that deal with the problems of news coverage and recovery has received the relatively narrow focus of the scientists. Thus, the presented article aims to analyse the discourse of natural disasters, to highlight the main content categories and their subtopics and to reveal the stylistic peculiarities of the news articles of the given topic. To achieve the main goal of the research the authors selected the collection of texts that were obtained from various news sites. To reveal the overall discourse structure we applied a content analysis that helped to identify various thematic patterns and subtopics and after that to calculate the frequency of each theme. Methods of corpus linguistics and critical stylistics allowed the authors to select the frequent words and word combinations constituting each thematic pattern and analyse the significant lexical peculiarities of the examined discourse. In conclusion, the authors present the main findings of their work and discuss the possibilities of further research in the area of discourse analysis of natural disaster media coverage.