Russian-culture-oriented discourse of english: prospects of corpus research

The present paper deals with the processes defining the development of the English language as a means of international communication in the era of globanglization, i.e. the establishment of English as the global lingua franca. The spreading practice of applying the language to external cultures predetermines the need of adapting it to new situations and tasks. The above said adaptation results in the emergence of variants of English of international communication, characterized by secondary cultural orientation. One of these variants is the English, oriented towards the Russian culture, which is the result of the adaptation of English to the tasks of dealing learning with external culture. The research highlighted here focuses on the Russian-culture-oriented discourse, aiming at identifying its markers - xenonymic Russianisms - on lexical, syntactic and stylistic levels. Apart from most evident cultural terms, Russianisms may take the form of literary allusions and quotations, proverbs and idioms, rhetorical and cognitive patterns. Thus, the formation of foreign-culture-oriented English is viewed in the light of expanding the language expressive potential, its development and enrichment. The research is based on a complex methodology, combining traditional methods of linguistic analysis with corpus technologies aimed at verifying the hypotheses and reducing the subjectivism. For example, applying national corpora allows revealing the place of the Russian-culture-oriented discourse under study within the general discursive space of the English language by identifying the frequency and the mode of functioning of its markers, in particular in different national variants of the English language, and possibly in the evolutionary aspect.