Transcultural Concept “Individual Mobility”: Mediatization Dynamics Through Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The research is relevant due to the interest of linguistics in studying Russian-language mediatization discursive practices, which contribute to the perception and evaluation of the contemporarily implemented concepts envisioned as a new social reality in media communication. The article introduces the mechanism of transcultural concept mediatization exemplified by the concept “Individual Mobility” that is emerging in the Russian language consciousness. The paper substantiates corpus linguistic methodology applicability to research into the scrutiny of the current media practices. The dynamic nature of introduction and inculcation of ideas upon the significance of mobility provided by personal transporters as the fashionable way of life, represented in the thesaurus of media texts corpus, proves research outcomes novelty. By applying the corpus methods, the linguistic mechanisms of the concept “Individual Mobility” mediatization are revealed as being represented in the dominance of translingual units in the key concept domain nominations and chronological variability in the nominative density of their implementation; the thematically heterogeneous nature of thesaurus of the texts corpus governs the perception of the contemporarily implemented concept by Russian-speaking actors of mass media discourse. The evaluation vector in conceptualization of the socially significant phenomenon under study in the Russian media discourse is determined, its specificity is described. The concept “Individual Mobility” mediatization is being traced in the hybridization of the thematic layer of media texts corpus, in particular, in the presence of administrative discourse vocabulary whilst the relative stability of terminology that nominates fashionable personal transporters and their users. The presence of lexical units, which comprise the thematic group “Risk of injury” accompanied by legal and administrative vocabulary, indicates the dynamic formation of mass critical and negative comprehension of the concept “Individual Mobility” domain accomplished by means of the chosen vectors of mediatization.

Keywords

• discourse-corpus methodology
• mediatization
• transcultural concept “individual mobility”
• russian media discourse
• thesaurus
• translingual unit
• linguistic adaptation