Verbalization of Successful Businesswoman's Image in English- and Russian-Language Media

The topicality of this paper is conditioned by two factors: the emergence of media linguistics as an independent field of scientific knowledge and the growing research interest in the ways of explicating female subjectivity, which is formed at the intersection of different discourse types/varieties (from familistic discourse to various business practices, where the ameliorative characterisation of women's image becomes dominant). In this regard, the content of the online magazine ‘Forbes Woman’ (Russian version) / ‘Forbes Women’ (English version) — one of the modern media sphere leaders, the ideological core of which is the thesis ‘women about women and for women’ — is chosen as the research material. It is especially significant that the publications of the Russian and English versions do not coincide in content and the structural components of the media image fix its ethnocultural conditionality. The analysis of media texts representing the successful businesswoman image shows that its semasiological content has been changing / expanding / restructuring in recent years, resulting in the addition of new components to the Russian and English cluster of lexical units attributing this media concept, thus defining a new ‘optics’ of the stereotype gender opposition perception. A certain redistribution of thematic dominants expressing the categorical attributes of female identity demonstrates both the media position and the audience's specific reflection of the ‘successful businesswoman’ status in a particular linguocultural community. At the same time, a number of universal verbal signs reflecting values common to the Russian/ English-speaking society testify to the emergence of a new meaning-forming component of the linguistic picture of the world.