Ilyinova E.Yu., Kochetova L.A. Media Representation of China in the Russian-Language News Discourse: Corpus-Assisted Reconstruction

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2025.5.2

Elena Yu. Ilyinova

Doctor of Sciences (Philology), Professor, Department of Translation Studies and Linguistics, Volgograd State University, Volgograd, Russia

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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3310-4020

Larisa A. Kochetova

Doctor of Sciences (Philology), Professor, Department of Translation Studies and Linguistics, Volgograd State University, Volgograd, Russia

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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5278-7373

Abstract. Using the method of corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the mediatization of the image of China in the Russian-language media outlets is studied. The quantitative parameters of the texts are extracted; the topics of news narratives and their distribution in the media are found, syntactic structures including the country nominations and supportive semantic classes of lexical items are identified; the evaluative and metaphorical components of the media image are reconstructed. The analysis of the quantitative parameters of the thematic corpus showed that short news texts and texts elaborating on the events signals predominantly an informative function. This finding is supported by topic modelling which revealed two out of nine dominant topics, namely "Business, Commerce, Economics, Finance" and "Politics and International Relations", the share of texts with the topics of culture, leisure, art and sports is not significant, which indicates a skewed coverage of the country's image in Russian official press. The nominations China, CPR, Beijing, Celestial Empire hold core positions in nominative, attributive, subject-predicate and predicate-object syntactic structures. The method of collocations revealed the main semantic classes of words used in the identified syntactic structures that form conceptual, evaluative and metaphorical representations of China's media conceptualization in Russian news narratives. The novelty of the research consists in demonstrating efficiency of the corpus linguistic tools in identifying a media image of a country conceptualized for discursive community perception by semantic techniques.

Key words: mediatization, news narrative, media representation, discursive corpus analysis, semantic representation, China.

Citation. Ilyinova E.Yu., Kochetova L.A. Media Representation of China in the Russian-Language News Discourse: Corpus-Assisted Reconstruction. Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Seriya 2. Yazykoznanie [Science Journal of Volgograd State University. Linguistics], 2025, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 21-37. (in Russian). DOI: https://doi.org/10.15688/jvolsu2.2025.5.2

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