Scholarly record

LINGVO-COGNITIVE APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF SOCIOCULTURAL THREATS

Elena Pozdnyakova, V. Zabotkina

Abstract

The study deals with the cognitive approach to investigation of sociocultural threats in Russia. Cognitive approach is understood in this article as a set of tools and methodologies used to identify in different types of discourse (news, fiction, academic) linguistic representations of threats as they are conceptualized and verbalized in modern Russian society. The purpose of the research is threefold: 1) to use the data of specially elaborated THREAT-corpus with the aim of identifying conceptual metaphors of threat; 2) to create a frame of sociocultural threats in order to structure macro-concept THREAT in social conscience of modern Russian society; 3) to categorize conceptual metaphors of threat in different types of discourse as SOFT THREAT and HARD THREAT. Methods employed in research, are: method of conceptual analysis, specifically, conceptual metaphor analysis; method of cognitive modeling of complex conceptual categories; method of knowledge representation modeling; socio-cognitive method of discourse analysis. The results of the study came as follows: 1) the search in the tagged THREAT-corpus provided the researchers with the scope of “threat”- centered collocations and sentences. The sub-sample of “threat”- representations was subsequently grouped into categories. 2) That grouping enabled the researchers to start the second phase: building a frame. During this part of the study the typical beliefs of people and institutions about phenomena that bring potential threats to the significant social structures constituted the basis for the slots of a macro-frame THREAT. The frame structure identified causes, motives and intentions of agents and situations that are conceptualized as threatening. The frame also represented feelings of patients, experiencing various types of threats: fear, alarm, search of security, finding the guilty, etc. 3) Next step of research resulted in identifying SOFT THREAT and HARD THREAT conceptual metaphors. It was determined that the subordinate category HARD THREAT includes such concepts as WAR, TERRORISM, MURDER, etc. The subordinate category SOFT THREAT includes such concepts as ISOLATION, SEGREGATION, LONELINESS, UNEMPLOYMENT, ANOMIE, etc. The results of the study have contributed much to the general interdisciplinary study of people’s behavioral and mental patterns of identifying threats as negative phenomena of life. The study opens a new direction of interdisciplinary research of sociocultural threats in narratology, corpus and cognitive linguistics.

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