Pragmatic enantiosemy of socio-political terms and its reflection in modern media

Abstract

In terms of regularity enantiosemy is inferior to such systematic manifestations as polysemy or synonymy, but it also takes an important place in the language system and manifests itself at all the language levels. The research deals with such a special type of enantiosemy as pragmatic enantiosemy of socio-political terminology. On the example of the term “optimization” the author presents how a radical change in the pragmatics of the term, at first meliorative one, forms enantiosemy. For the identification of the social, psycholinguistic and linguocultural causes of pragmatic enantiosemy, the media contexts of the term “optimization” were studied, the method of discursive-contextual and linguopragmatic analysis, as well as the technique of internal introspection, appealing to linguistic intuition and knowledge of the social and linguocultural situation were used. An important criterion for changes is the reflection of the authors of media texts about not only the concept, but also the term itself. The semantics of the term “optimization” was polarized relating to the original one: the word began to mean not ‘improvement,’ but ‘deterioration,’ ‘destruction,’ ‘scrapping,’ ‘collapse,’ even ‘catastrophe,’ which makes it possible to talk about the enantiosemy formation. It is important to emphasize that the change in the pragmatics (and at the same time the semantic essence) of the word “optimization,” occurred solely under the influence of extralinguistic social factors, led to the formation of enantiosemy, since a positive context remained possible in principle.

Keywords

• media discourse
• media language
• linguistic pragmatics
• enantiosemy
• socio-political terminology