Terezia Rončáková

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Slovak Polarized Discourse: expressive religious elements in the language of conservative and liberal media

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The paper is based on an extensive content analysis of opinion articles in Slovak conservative and liberal media. The author examines framing, argumentation, attribution, and expressiveness in these texts. In this paper, she will focus on some of her findings on expressive linguistic elements in talking about "the other", with an emphasis on the religious aspects of this heated communication. In a sample of 500 articles, she found 69 texts with religious expressions and analysed them within five variables: tonality towards the object, tonality towards religion, emotion, petrification, linguistic character. This brought findings on the differences between conservative and liberal media in what attitude they take towards religion, what emotion prevails in their communication and how they handle petrified language structures, allusions, irony, figurative names and adjectives.