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Abstract As an important means for presenting attitudes towards a subject, media images have long been a major topic for critical discourse analysis. Of all the critical discourse studies on the Syrian conflict, most have focused on the media images of Syria or those of the refugees of Syria with only few touching upon the images of the countries involved in the war. The present study seeks to investigate and compare the national images of the United States and Turkey in Russian media reports as well as their diachronic changes across the three phases of the Syria conflict. A combined research paradigm of critical discourse analysis and corpus examination was used to explore the attitudinal meanings of the media by examining the typical collocations of the selected keywords in a self-built corpus of Russian media reports on the Syrian conflict. Results show that during the three phrases of the Syrian conflict, different images were constructed for the United States and Turkey, respectively, in Russian media, with a sequential positive-negative-negative image for the United States compared to a negative-positive-negative image for Turkey. These findings suggest that the differences in the image construction for the US and Turkey were tied to the Russian sociopolitical contexts and ideologies across the different phrases of the Syrian conflict. This study not only uncovers the ideological characteristics underpinning the Russian media’s discourse on the Syrian conflict but also provides valuable insights into the power relationships between Russia and the major participating countries of the Syrian war.
Key words: critical discourse analysis; the Syrian conflict; the Russian media; national image
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