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The article deals with the basic trends of regions in the context of globalization and regionalizationof the world’s economy. The most important factors of regional development today are theinnovation resource areas, their institutional environment, political regimes as well as regional policy,and geographical and socio-demographic factors.

The article is focused on the analysis of metaphorical modeling of the Russian image in the modern U.S. media texts. The undertaken research stresses the importance of metaphorical modeling in understanding the national world picture and national stereotypes. Basic metaphorical models reveal three negative prevailing trends in representing the image of Russia and contemporary Russian political discourse such as negative image of the Russian leader; negative image of Russia; negative relations between Russia and the United States (based on the metaphor "Image of the Enemy"). The research in metaphorical modeling of Russia in mass media of the United States of America is up-to-date as it gives grounds for classifying the material within situational, contextual and cultural aspects. It is also argued that some metaphorical models are common while others are culturally peculiar and totally stereotyped. The core of the research includes the texts addressed at readers from diverse academic backgrounds, methods of continuous sampling and comparative analysis were applied. The investigation of a wide range of political discourses leads to in-depth study of the national culture and world perception as it allows to identify the functions of particular metaphorical models, the identification of source domains of metaphorical expressions, the relationship between metaphor and discourse, and the priming of metaphors. Moreover, a number of approaches to and exploitations of political metaphors in modeling the image of Russia in the American mass media, including conceptual metaphor theory and cognitive approaches are discussed, explored and critiqued using corpus data. The present research also includes corpus linguistic studies of different aspects of metaphor, which investigate its linguistic and semantic properties and relate them to current theoretical views. The article demonstrates the need for naturally-occurring language data to be used in the development of metaphor theory, and shows the value of corpus data in this work. Thus, the ways of researching metaphor from different perspectives is carried out especially through corpus linguistics. Identifying metaphorical languageuse is one of the challenges facing natural language processing.

The prospects and trends for the development of border regions of the former Soviet Union have become one of the profound research areas in the field of economic geography recently. In the conditions of planned economy in the Republics of the USSR, a vertical system of industrial complexes was formed, with the focus on performing national economic tasks. There have been some significant changes in the border regions of independent post-Soviet States in the process of transition to the market economy model. The analysis of the industrial and territorial structure is done on the example of Russia and Kazakhstan. The formation of a common market on the basis of the Eurasian Economic Union allowed the border regions to make the most of their competitive advantage in attracting investments. The unique geographical particularity of the research object is manifested in the fact that there are no analogues of the longest land border in the world as between Russia and Kazakhstan. The new forms of production organisation are implemented in the border regions of the studied countries over more than 7,000 km. More than a quarter of a century later, transformation processes are clearly observed in the mining and manufacturing industries, agriculture, transport and services. As a result, the “regional asymmetry” of industrial development can be observed when manufacturing regions with high added value become the “cores” of economic development of cross-border relations between Russia and Kazakhstan.

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