China in the linguistic political reference frame of media discourse in Russian and English languages
The following article studies texts of political media discourse in the framework of the manipulative potential. The study is focused on the verbal phenomena contributing to the achievement of the major purpose of political discourse -a struggle for power. The comparative analyses of texts in the Russian and English languages revealed common trends in designing the surface structure, aiming to realize the authors’ intentions. Meanwhile, the in-depth information has a prevalently opposite meaning in the discourse of different countries. To achieve the aims of our work, we have studied the speech manipulation technology “us/them”. It enabled us to find out how one and the same object gets opposite characteristics in discourse. The nucleus of this technology contains the ontological opposition “us/them”, which is of fundamental importance in politics. The verbal level is characterized by typical speech manipulation instruments - “us/them” opposition markers, deictics, evaluative lexis, words with ideological connotations, secondary nominations, and contrast. The outer layer of the text is structured so that the author’s intention could be achieved and the position of China in the linguistic political reference frame of media discourse could be defined. The article concludes that the position of the PRC in the linguistic-political models of the world turns out to be polar: in the Russian-language discourse, China is more likely to be “us”, and in the American, it is mostly “them”.