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| 1 | Introduction. The paper is devoted to the oligarchy’s description as an axiologically marked phenomenon from the language point of view. The necessity to take into account the perception of oligarchy in other cultures, the analysis of the national peculiarities of the oligarchy representation in the language, the need for the comparative research make the study of the mentioned phenomenon up-to-date. Material and methods. Mass-media texts retrieved from the sub-corpus of the British national corpus (NOW corpus) serve as the material for the analysis. NOW corpus contains newspaper and magazine articles dated 2010-2018. Results and discussion. Collocation analysis of the term oligarchy in the British national corpus is carried out according to the following criteria: types, characteristic features, co-occurrence with other concepts, metaphoric conceptualization of the phenomenon under study. As the result of the analysis it is shown that oligarchy’s representation in the British mass-media discourse is determined by social and discursive peculiarities of a definite linguo-culture. Alongside with the universal features (the connection of oligarchy with a definite sphere of human activity) the English language possesses special terms for denoting this destructive phenomenon in this or that country. In examining the relation between oligarchy and other negative phenomena the latter is viewed not as different from the rest of the destructive things but as synonymous to them (corruption and oligarchy, despotism and oligarchy, imperialism and oligarchy). The metaphoric representation of oligarchy is not constituted by a wide range of features. The theoretical relevance of the research consists in the development of the mass-media discourse and axiological linguistics’ theory through the analysis of the ordinary definition of the term on the basis of newspapers and magazines. The applicability of the study consists in the possibility of using the results of the analysis while studying other axiologically marked phenomena in different cultures and through the prism of different time segments. Conclusion. The paper outlines possible prospects for research, including consideration of the interpretation of the phenomenon of oligarchy on the material of English discourse in the diachronic aspect, which will complement the results and identify those aspects of the presentation of the analyzed phenomenon that are not present in the representation of the oligarchy phenomenon in modern English. Keywords: oligarchy, British national corpus, mass-media discourse, destructive phenomenon, axiologically marked phenomenon | 1361 | ||||