Abstract
The aim of the article is to describe the development of the notion "discourse" from the 20th century up to the present in the Czech republic and in Russia and to show the specifics of its usage in mass media studies. Discourse is one of the key notions in liberal arts (linguistics, literary studies, sociology, psychology, political science, philosophy, history etc.) and an object of numerous interdisciplinary researches.
Although discourse analysis already existed in ancient Greece thanks to philosophy and rhetoric, the studies, regarding the discourse as a separate object of a research, made their appearance only in 1960s (the cognitive paradigm). However, there is no common definition of discourse that is universally recognized due to its miscellaneous and multi-layered character.
Nowadays, the notion of discourse is often used to categorize different spheres of human activities (political discourse, religious discourse, mass media discourse, feminist discourse etc.) and to explore the linguistic image of the world. Discourse analysis enables to study the specifics in the use of a language and speech strategies in the wide social context.