Russian-Chinese idioms in political texts: A corpus-based functional and social aspects investigation

Abstract

The aim of this research is to demonstrate the relationship between functional variations of idioms in political texts in Russian and Chinese and underlying sociocultural factors. To achieve this goal, a comparison of idiom usage in political texts from the last three years was conducted, focusing on the corpora of government reports in both the Chinese and Russian languages. The study is based on the linguistic models of functional linguistic and cultural analysis. The scientific novelty lies in the presentation of the CLDAM model (Cultural-Linguistic Discourse Analysis Model), which integrates the classical theory of critical discourse analysis by Fairclough (CDA) with the language function framework proposed by Jakobson and Halliday. Within the scope of this research, a qualitative and quantitative comparison of phraseological units in government reports of the two countries is conducted for the first time. The study reveals clear differences in the structure, syntax, and linguistic functions of idioms used in political documents of Russia and China over the past three years. These differences are influenced by social factors, such as political structure, economy, educational level of the audience, and national philosophy.