“Language of Values” in Domestic Internet Media: Cognitive-and-Discursive Aspect

Abstract

The article discusses the problem of detecting and interpreting the value components of Russian words in the Internet media discourse, which do not have an explicit language expression. The method of cognitive- and-discursive analysis of corpus data is applied. It is based on the research technique of identifying semantic auras (semantic prosody) of the word studied in its immediate contextual environment in texts. The material under study is comprised of contexts extracted from the newspaper corpus as part of the Russian National Corpus. The relative adjective progressivnyj (progressive, advanced), which does not have any evaluativeness in the lexical- semantic system of the Russian language, in its discursive realization demonstrates an implicit positive or negative evaluation, induced in the context, regularly arises. The author came to the conclusion that positive evaluation associated with the semantic components “promoting progress, advanced” and “imbued with advanced ideas, sentiments” is most often realized. However, in a number of uses, the immediate or further contextual environment contributes to implication and negative evaluation, which is caused by ideas about “excessive” progressiveness, i.e. exceeding the norm, from the speaker’s point of view, and that progress also concerns the negative aspects of social or cultural life.

Keywords

• “language of values”
• value
• cognitive-and-discursive analysis
• corpus data
• internet media discourse
• semantic prosody
• induced evaluation