Military terminology in media texts: the “unmanned aerial vehicles” thematic group

The study was carried through the lens of media linguistics, a current trend of research and an integral discipline that employs a systematic approach to analyzing the language of mass media. The mass media, which capture public attention, prominently feature key words that hold significant political and ideological weight in our times. Among the socially relevant issues extensively and systematically covered in the media are events pertaining to the ongoing special military operation in Ukraine. Given the critical nature of these political developments for Russian society as a whole, military vocabulary has transitioned from a specialized domain to widespread use in media discourse over the past three years. Notably, this includes the terminology associated with modern weaponry, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This study aims to examine the discursive verbal units from the thematic group of “unmanned aerial vehicles” in military-political media texts, analyzing them as linguistic markers of our era through the lenses of derivation, semantics, and syntagmatics.