"Greatness" of Russia in the Sochi 2014 discourse

The article investigates the linguistic means used in American journalistic discourse to describe a stereotype of Russia as a great, vast country. The stereotype, understood as a nationally and ideologically colored and stable fragment of the concept, is considered in the discourse. Discourse, in turn, characterized as recurrent, was analyzed in the text which represents it. It is found out that the signs of Russia’s greatness in the discourse under analysis are updated with the help of various linguistic resources: nouns ( grandeur ), adjectives ( great, the largest, the third-largest, giant, largest, big, the most expensive, considerable ), verbs ( surpass ( surpassing )), the names of numerals ( third largest, three times more, $ 51 billion, $ 170 million ), names of numbers ( million, billion ) and currencies, adverbs ( further over ). The main type of assessment used in the text is negative. Signs of Russia’s greatness are revealed in close association with the money and sports and dependent on them.