Formal Markers and Conceptual Mainstays of the Russia-Centered Discourse: a Cross-Linguistic Corpus Study

The paper aims at identifying the key features of the Russia-centered discourse both on surface and deep levels. The empirical basis for the research is comprised by the Rossica-T corpus of book titles, encompassing data for 18-21 centuries. Titles are viewed as the most distinguished parts of texts, to which the most significant information is promoted, thus forming the quintessence of the discourse they represent. The research is based on three datasets – the English, Finnish and Japanese subcorpora totaling 590 titles. The data was subject to analysis with the help of the AntConc corpus manager toolkit and deep discourse analysis underlying the manual annotation of the corpus along seven groups of parameters. The surface level analysis focuses on three aspects: syntactic, lexical, and stylistic. The syntactic analysis revealed a spectrum of structural patterns whose frequency is largely conditioned by the requirements of the title genre; yet, being genre-conditioned, they are also partly discourse-conditioned, serving to verbalize key concepts of the Russia-centered discourse and to expand the structure of the title so as to maximize its expressive capacity. The stylistic analysis allowed us to identify a restricted set of stylistic means, partly correlating with the genre canon (e.g. alliteration), and partly – with the discourse canon (e.g. metaphors, intertextual links). The lexical analysis helped determine two markers – a genre-specific (naming the genre of the book the title represents) and a discourse-specific (xenonymic Russianisms). Cross-linguistic comparison of strategies introducing Russianisms into texts describing Russia in different languages revealed the greatest degree of specificity of the Japanese-language discourse where the method of introducing and marking Russianisms is predetermined by their “gairaigo” status. Yet, this specificity does not go contrary to the norms and regularities of the language of secondary cultural orientation, which allows for the conclusion of a universal mechanism of a language cultural reorientation. The task of identifying the conceptual mainstays of the discourse was approached in two ways: (1) categorization of the subcorpora keywords and (2) interpretation of the subcorpora semantic annotation results. Both approaches allow for the conclusion of a partial overlap in conceptual mainstays for the three discourse types, with a noticeable variation in the choice of the key concepts’ representants.