Comparative characteristic of linguistic representation of the concept of Trade War in mass media of the People’s Republic of China and the United States

Abstract

This article is dedicated to analysis of the concept of Trade War in Chinese and American linguocultures. The initial position of the research is the thesis on unavoidable conceptualization of the objects and phenomena of the surrounding world in language, and possibility of their studying by means of conceptual analysis. The subject of this research is the specificity of representation of the concept of Trade War in media discourse in Chinese and English languages. Special attention is given to the semantic core of the concept and its speech representation in the news materials. The research methodology is based on a two-stage conceptual analysis. The first stage implies the analysis of core of the concept by means of definitional and etymological analysis of representative word; while the second stage marks quantitative and qualitative content analysis for determination of similarities and differences in peripheral meaning of the concept. The main theoretical conclusion consists in substantiation of using content analysis for determination of specificity of speech representation of media concepts. The practical result of this research lies in identification of significant differences in the concept under consideration in two linguistic cultures: Chinese media texts review Trade War primarily as a “struggle to gain economic profit”; and the US media view it as a “competition in trade industry”. The formulated conclusions largely correlate with the peculiarities of mentality of the residents of People’s Republic of China and the United States.