Tell Me, Who Is Your Friend: Concept of FRIEND in the Modern Russian Media Discourse (on the Material of the Russian National Corpus 2014)

Abstract

The article presents the results of a study about FRIEND as a Russian concept — one of the most striking Culture Specific (in terms of A. Wierzbicka) Russian concepts that attracted and still attract the attention of many linguists. The experience of our predecessors has shown that the Russian concept of FRIEND as a result of various social, historical processes undergoes certain changes in structure and substantive content. The aim of our study was to determine the content and structure of the Russian concept of FRIEND in contemporary Russian media discourse. The study used data from the National corpus of the Russian language as the source materials: a search was carried out on newspaper co-variation; the search criteria were the parameters of “adjective + FRIEND noun” at a distance of 1 word from each other. After exclusion of irrelevant examples (e.g., in the case of homonyms of adverbs and short forms of adjectives) a sample of 150 examples was obtained for the analysis (for example, a German friend, good friend, new friends, best friend).