The image of lithuania in lithuanian online media portals

The image of Lithuania in Lithuanian online media portals The aim of this thesis is to analyse what kind of image of Lithuania is presented in Lithuanian Internet news portals bernardinai.lt and delfi.lt. The purpose is to compare the image in two different Internet portals and find out, if approach was more negative or positive, and compare images from those two prospectives. For the investigation it was chosen a corpus linguistics methodology together with the qualitative analysis of samples. There were created two corpora for this research: one of them is based on articles found in bernardinai.lt and another one in delfi.lt Internet portals. Each of them consisted of 50.182 words. Overall there were found 958 samples with the word Lithuania mentioned, but only 354 of them could be related with presenting image of the country. During the research all the samples were divided into two main groups. One of them represents positive image of Lithuania, while another one negative. The samples were not only investigated by perspective of time: it was provided current, past view of Lithuania or future prognosis for Lithuania, but also by who expressed one or another kind of attitude towards Lithuania. Research has shown that in both corpora there are more positive than negative images of Lithuania presented: although the difference between positive and negative images of the country in delfi.lt is slight, in bernardinai.lt there are clearly more positive ones. In bernardinai.lt corpora negative images of the country were created mostly by Lithuanians, who were born and grew up in foreign country, but are living or lived in Lithuania for many years, while in delfi.lt corpora emigrants were the ones who expressed negative attitude towards Lithuania mostly. In both corpora emigrants also dominated among the ones, who were associating Lithuania with positive things in most cases. As mentioned before there were also different time perspectives analyzed in each corpora: people were expressing their thoughts about past, future and present of Lithuania. However research revealed that both positive and negative attitude were presented mostly towards the present of Lithuania. The research might be useful for the scientists of social science who are interested in images of country, created in Internet portals