Lexical Framing and Contextual-Semantic Adequacy in Selected Media Coverage of the Second Karabakh War

Abstract

This qualitative comparative discourse-analytical study examines how selected English-language media texts framed events of the Second Karabakh War through event nomination, agency, attribution, legal-status labels, humanitarian representation, place naming, and verification vocabulary. The primary corpus comprises 69 texts published by 11 Azerbaijani, Türkiye-based, and international outlets between 27 September and 10 November 2020. A separate BBC Reality Check article is examined as a contextual verification case and is excluded from corpus counts. Full reports were consulted for context, while systematic lexical coding focused mainly on headlines and leads, with selected article co-text used in five cases. Article-level coding shows that legal-restorative framing was the most common primary frame in the Azerbaijani subset (18/34; 52.9%) and the Türkiye-based subset (8/16; 50.0%). The international subset was more evenly distributed across diplomatic-outcome and humanitarian frames (5/19; 26.3% each), military-operational and attributional-evidential frames (4/19; 21.1% each), and military-outcome framing (1/19; 5.3%). The article proposes contextual-semantic adequacy as a multidimensional category encompassing denotational fit, agency visibility, evidential calibration, attribution transparency, legal-context explicitness, humanitarian specificity, toponymic transparency, and digital verification. The bounded conflict serves as the empirical setting for a transferable analytical framework. Because the corpus is purposive and heterogeneous, and the verification analysis is based on a single contextual case, the findings describe patterns in the sampled materials rather than entire media systems.