Representations of Russia and the Russian national character in the modern advertising discourse: linguistic and cognitive analysis

We refer to the concept of the country’s image, which arose in the practice of politicians, government executives, and marketing specialists and has been actively developed in recent decades in the works of representatives of various branches of scientific knowledge: linguists, political scientists, sociologists, philosophers, etc. Media discourse becomes a communication space within which messages are created, on the one hand, reflecting the stereotypical attitudes of the internal and external audience regarding Russia and the Russian people, on the other, correcting negative and reinforcing positive ethnic stereotypes. In this work, the media image of Russia is modeled on the basis of texts of commercial, social and political advertising, speeches of political figures, in particular, in the framework of the election campaign. As a basic methodology, we use the frame modeling method, reconstructs the “Russia” frame in Russian and foreign advertising discourse. Russian commercial advertising forms a positive image of a great, beautiful country with a strong and spiritually rich people, and the concept of “Russian” is used in texts exclusively with positive connotations. Russian social advertising creates the image of a country with a rich history and a great past, however it represents modern Russia as a country in which spiritual values play an increasingly smaller role. The external image of Russia can be generally assessed as negative. The sphere in which the least attractive image is realized is politics. The political theme is updated in all considered types of media discourse and forms the image of a backward, undemocratic state with high corruption and Soviet heritage.

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