«Карьера» темной лошадки
"Career" of a dark horse

Summary/Abstract: The English idiom dark horse as the idea of a racehorse of unknown form but thought to have a good chance is well-known in a lot of languages in Europe. The source of the idiom was Benjamin Disraeli’s novel The Young Duke (1831). In this study, I would like to demonstrate – by the example of a Russian idiom (темная лошадка ‘lit. a dark little horse’) and a Czech idiom (černý kůň ‘a black horse’) – what processes go on during its actualization in discourse. I will explore the history of the usage of this idiom in Russian and Czech starting from the 1960s until the modern journalism. The analysis is conducted on the basis of data found in the Russian National Corpus and the Czech National Corpus.

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