The Image of Russia in British Media Discourse (based on The Guardian and Daily Mail Articles)

The image of the state is a multi-faceted cultural phenomenon that is studied from different points of view, including its linguistic means of representation in the mass media. The purpose of the present study is to reconstruct the image of Russia in the British media, analyzing the linguistic means of its representation. On the basis of the corpus created on the material of the popular British media "The Guardian" and "Daily Mail", the analysis of the combinability of the lexemes that verbalize the image of Russia is carried out, the propositional and metaphorical models of the image of Russia are reconstructed on the basis of the established correlations. According to the results of the present study, the image of Russia mostly depends on its domestic and external policies. In the analyzed media, the characterization of Russia tends to be negative. Russia is presented as the authoritarian and corrupted state that widely uses disinformation, as well as overt and covert interference in the policy of the other states. The study demonstrates the possibility of using the corpus approach in discursive analysis and may be useful for specialists in the field of political linguistics and intercultural communication.