Functional Contrastive Analysis to Identify Communicatively Equivalent Cross-Linguistic Correspondences

The article focuses on developing and testifying a method for searching for communicatively equivalent cross-linguistic correspondences using the corpora of original untranslated English-language and Russian-language popular science texts on the topic of the northern lights published within the period of 2010 to 2024. This method is referred to as functional contrastive analysis that is aimed at identifying regular similarities and differences in how a language is used in typical communicative situations, i.e. the texts matched in terms of the topic and genre. The method incorporates insights from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, comparative studies and corpus linguistics (T-Lab software). Using this method, it is possible to identify the main cognitive models that are presented in the parallel texts and their linguistic means of representation that correspond to the discursive norms of the compared languages. The linguistic means of representation of cognitive models were structured by the method of lexical-semantic paradigmatic and syntagmatic field of the key words, which has information of three levels: cognitive, linguistic and discourse. On the one hand, the lexico-semantic field is the result of interpretation of the texts, and, on the other hand, it represents the language in its "pre-speech production readiness," which has enormous potential for translation practice.