Emil Persson

Political Mythmaking and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi : Olympism and the Russian Great Power Myth

The theoretical point of departure of this paper is that the perspective of political myth adds to the understanding of political developments in Russia. The upcoming Olympic Winter Games in Sochi in 2014 are discursively constructed as a manifestation of Russias return to great power status. In official Russian discourse, there is an encounter between the Russian great power myth and the myth of Olympism, both of which are employed to strengthen the status of Russia and of President Putin personally. Thus, the Olympic values of humanism, internationalism, and progress are merged with Russian great power ideals. But there are also examples where the prevailing myths are turned around to criticise the regime and the Sochi Games. However, the most serious challenge to the Putin regime may stem from the great power myth itself, should the regime prove unable to deliver what it requires.

Direkt Profil: A System for Evaluating Texts of Second Language Learners of French Based on Developmental Sequences

Direkt Profil is an automatic analyzer of texts written in French as a second language. Its objective is to produce an evaluation of the developmental stage of students under the form of a grammatical learner profile. Direkt Profil carries out a sentence analysis based on developmental sequences, i.e. local morphosyntactic phenomena linked to a development in the acquisition of French. The paper presents the corpus that we use to develop the system and briefly, the developmental sequences. Then, it describes the annotation that we have defined, the parser, and the user interface. We conclude by the results obtained so far: on the test corpus the systems obtains a recall of 83% and a precision of 83%.

Coveted, detested and unattainable? Images of the US superpower role and self-images of Russia in Russian print media discourse

•This article explores how the image of the USA has developed in two major Russian daily newspapers, Izvestiya and Komsomolskaya Pravda, in a time period comprised of a total 20 weeks’ of study in the years of 1984, 1994, 2004 and 2009. For Russia this time span was dramatic: it moved from seemingly stable superpower in the 1980s, over the chaos after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, to the partial comeback to great power status at the beginning of the 21st century. While telling the story of how the image of the USA has evolved, the article also describes how Russian self-images have developed. The image projected of the USA was Manichean in the 1980s, whereas the most benevolent images were found in the 1990s. The examples from 2004 and 2009 reflect an assertive Russia that is back on the world stage. The USA is here again often criticized, but also — as before — comprises the scale against which Russia itself is measured. •