Opravy

SUMMARY Nowadays in the era of globalization a thesis that language constructs social world has acquired special actuality.

This paper is dedicated to studying linguistics and cultural aspects of positioning Russia in English-speaking tourist Internet discourse.

The paper aims at identification and systematization of linguistics methods of positioning Russia by foreign (English-speaking) tourists.

American travellers’ personal blogs about Russia, including the most representative one (http://lifeinrussiablog.com) with 8500 readers, have served as a material for the research.

The method of continuous selection of blogs and Internet portals was used in order to create empirical base: corpus with 36565 words.

The following criteria were taken into consideration while selecting blogs: language (English), blog contents (about Russia); blogger’s status (a traveler who has visited Russia), date of publication (for the last ten years).

Several research methods have been employed: content analysis, lexicon-semantic analysis, survey, corpus orientated discourse analysis.

Theoretically the paper is based on several Russian linguists’ works dedicated to tourist discourse: N. V. Filatova, L.R. Sakayeva, L.V. Bazarova, L.E. Bakhvalova, M. V. Terskikh, A.P. Chudinov, L.V.

Vinogradova, V. G.

Mironova and others.

After analyzing all the above mentioned works (by means of electronic library), we may conclude that peculiarities of constructing the image of a country and travellers’ reviews and impressions have not been researched.

The practical value of the work is that its results will be useful to representatives of tourist branch and also local authorities while making decisions on improvement of tourist infrastructure of Nizhny Novgorod and its region.

Keyword ‘great’, revealed by the online http://textexture program in the semantic space of the studied blogs, the composition of blogs (in particular a change of tone from negative to positive) and the readers’ comments indirectly confirm the thesis that language constructs social reality.

It was noted that the traditional perception of Russia by the residents of the USA is defined by installation on distortion and discredit.

A visit to Russia and acquaintance to blogs of the tourists who have been to Russia break existing stereotypes.

Semantic dominants of the studied blogs have been established: Russia - a country of other culture and Russia - a country without household conveniences.

A survey conducted from July to September, 2014 by means of the googledocs Internet form with participation of 23 people who visited Nizhny Novgorod during this period showed that the tourist picture of the city is similar to an overall picture of tourism in Russia represented by bloggers.