Lacunary phraseological units characterizing males in Russian and Chinese

Abstract

The study is devoted to a comparative analysis of lacunar phraseological units characterizing male figures in Russian and Chinese as indicators of linguocultural specificity. The relevance is determined by the expansion of intercultural communication and translation practices, where the absence of equivalents causes semantic and evaluative distortions. The aim was to identify the typology and causes of lacunarity, map thematic zones of greatest divergence, and describe the sources of imagery that form national models of masculinity. The novelty lies in the quantitative stratification of lacunae by theme, connotation, type of mismatch, and imagery base, which makes it possible to move from isolated observations to a systematic description. The material included 185 Russian and 210 Chinese phraseological units extracted from authoritative dictionaries with verification of their usage in the Russian National Corpus and the BCC corpus. The methodology combined contrastive and comparative analysis, component and linguocultural analysis, as well as statistical processing of frequencies, proportions, and intergroup differences. The inclusion criterion was the presence of a stable semantic component indicating the characterization of a man; a lacuna was recorded in the absence of a phraseological equivalent or in cases of partial semantic mismatch and stylistic incomparability. To increase reliability, thematic and connotative coding with double validation was carried out. The results show that in both samples moral and ethical qualities are most frequently phraseologized, while in Russian a higher proportion of units describes attitudes toward women and family, and in Chinese - appearance and volitional qualities. At the level of lacuna types, partial semantic mismatch dominates; moreover, Chinese lacunae are more often based on culturally specific imagery, whereas Russian ones - on the very fact of idiomatization of everyday realities. The connotative profile is asymmetrical: the Russian sample is characterized by a higher proportion of negative evaluations, the Chinese - of positive ones; neutral meanings are comparable. The sources of imagery differ: Russian lacunae are based on everyday and social realities and zoometaphors, Chinese on literary and historical heritage and somatisms. The discussion interprets these asymmetries as a reflection of cultural dominants: in the Russian linguistic consciousness, men's social and everyday roles are critically evaluated, while in the Chinese, the ethical and volitional ideal, reinforced by precedent tradition, is idealized. The practical significance lies in the development of translation strategies to overcome eruditional and evaluative lacunae, clarification of teaching commentaries to phraseological units, and the use of lacunarity maps in teaching Russian-Chinese intercultural communication. Prospects include expansion of the corpus, automated identification of lacunae, and experimental studies of image perception by native speakers.