Peculiarities of the semantics and functioning of color lexemes in the language of the Russian and Chinese media (the case of green color)

The article deals with color-term lexemes in the modern Russian and Chinese languages. The focus is on a comparative study of the semantics and functioning of the lexemes ‘zelenyi’ (green), ‘绿’ (green, lü), and ‘青’ (a polysemous color name with the meaning of ‘green’, qing) in the Russian and Chinese mass media; their language connotations are investigated. The study employed the descriptive and comparative methods and the method of contextual analysis. The article analyzes the main and implied meanings of green-color terms through the examples of expressions and phrases with a green lexeme found in Russian and Chinese linguistic databases such as the Standardized terminology base for foreign translation of Chinese characteristic discourse, Russian National Corpus, General Internet Corpus of Russian, etc. The author seeks to investigate the multiple meanings of green-color lexemes in the Russian and Chinese languages, notes the expansion of their meaning, especially in the Russian and Chinese mass media. The conducted research shows that the emergence of the new meaning of the green-color lexeme is closely connected with the cultural and social changes in Russia and China. The importance of using linguocultural color lexemes in the language of modern media is emphasized by the fact that the lexeme ‘green’ as a bright language feature performs the function of expressive informing, conveys the national value. The initial analysis of the polysemy and metaphoricity of the Chinese lexeme ‘青’ (qing) carried out in the article fills a gap in the study of the use of the polysemous color name ‘青’ (qing) in translation of texts written by the Russian classics into Chinese and contributes to further in-depth lexicosemantic, lexicographical, and translation studies on the translation of this lexeme.