BRICS by BRICS: Temporal characteristics of the forecasting genre in Russian and South African media discourse

Vollständiger Abstract

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Significant shifts in global relations make it relevant to study the image of BRICS’ future to understand how the grouping can affect the global agenda. The aim is to analyse the means used in the genre of forecasting in Russian and South African media discourse. The criterion for selecting texts is thematic: they are related to the prospects of BRICS. The sources are the Russian National Corpus, the News on the Web Corpus, and archives of newspapers. The units analysed are lexical, grammatical, and figurative means used to convey the future. The Voyant Tools program is used for automated data processing, which makes it possible to quantify the distribution of language units at different levels. The qualitative methods employed are definitional, component, contextual, cognitive and discourse, comparative, and metaphorical modelling methods. The findings suggest that in the two discourses, the core of the futurity is constituted by the future tense forms of the verb; the near periphery is represented by the present tense forms, often accompanied by lexemes with prospective semantics in various syntactic functions; the far periphery includes modal verbs, expressions and words rendering the meanings of probability, possibility, and ability to perform an action in the future. The dominant metaphors (mechanism, construction, path, game) have significant potential in modelling BRICS’ future, representing the grouping as a key factor that affects global development.