Commemorative Practices in Urban Discourse Space: Historical-Political Projection

Abstract

The paper focuses on the potential of urban communicative space to transmit basic ideology paradigm and values of the current political regime in the course of interaction with city residents. Commemoration is regarded as one the key entities involved in transmitting ideologically charged information. The phenomenon of commemoration is understood as a collection of public practices aimed at creating government-approved values and behavioral models via regular reproduction schemes implemented on the basis of perception of past recognized in the society. The goal of the research was to examine verbalization of commemoration in urban space with regard to the historical-political context. The empirical basis of the study includes a corpus of commemorative texts collected by the authors. Commemorative texts were extracted from the open data portal developed and supported by the Government of Moscow. The total number of records registered in the corpus amounted to over 1700. The language data were processed via the AntConc software that allows obtaining information about word frequency and the contexts in which the relevant word occurs. In the next step conclusions about topical and conceptual dominants of commemorative texts were made. Further investigation allowed describing the structural scheme of commemorative texts, determining its zero variability in different temporal periods, identifying an obligatory structural element that displayed sensitiveness to political climate and specifying key discourse strategies correlated with the ideological paradigm of the current political regime.

Keywords

• collective memory
• commemoration
• commemorative practice
• memory plaque
• city