Naming of Actors in Russian and Chinese News

The material of the study consists of 200 news texts from modern online outlets (100 in Russian and 100 in Chinese), selected from two sections: “incidents” and “celebrity news”. The analysis focused on the following types of referential expressions: proper names, pronouns, descriptors (common noun phrases describing a particular characteristic of the referent) as well as their combinations and subtypes (e.g., a descriptor with a name: actor Ivanov ; a compound descriptor: a twenty-year-old actor ). Descriptors belong to the following semantic groups: gender, age, profession, position, country, city, relation to other characters, and situational feature. The novelty of the study lies in the comparative analysis of how the main protagonist of a news text is nominated in two languages that differ substantially in grammatical system and journalistic tradition. The results show that in both languages the protagonist of an incident report is typically introduced by a descriptor, whereas in celebrity news the initial reference combines a proper name and a descriptor. In medial (2-5) mentions, alternation between names and descriptors is observed, while closer to the final mentions the share of pronouns increases. In Chinese incident reports, proper names appear significantly more frequently than in Russian ones, typically in the form of anonymized “indefinite” names with concealed elements. Semantic preferences for descriptors also differ: in Chinese texts gender is explicitly marked lexically, whereas in Russian it is not highlighted due to the grammatical category of gender. In Russian celebrity news, profession is the primary marker, while in Chinese texts greater emphasis is placed on rank or position. In incident reports, references to a city are common: in Chinese texts they usually appear from the very first mention, while in Russian texts they occur from the second mention onward. The findings confirm that the structure of referential chains is determined not only by the grammatical features of the language but also by journalistic traditions and editorial policies. The comparison reveals both universal tendencies in the organization of news discourse and language-specific features of Russian and Chinese media communication.