Семантическая структура лексемы «Толерантность» в современной русской языковой картине мира

Abstract

This article is aimed to analyze a semantic structure of the lexeme ‘tolerantnost’’ [tolerance] that functions in the Russian linguistic world-image. The material was collected from the Russian National Corpus, associative dictionaries, texts of the modern Internet discourse: posts from social networks and forums with such requests as ‘Kak vy ponimayete tolerantnost’? [What do you understand under tolerance?], ‘Kak Vy ob”yasnyayete detyam, chto takoye tolerantnost’?’ [How do you explain to children what tolerance is?], ‘Kak vesti sebya tolerantno’ [How to behave tolerantly], etc. The choice of the material is conditioned by the research agenda to identify interpretation patterns of this unit given by modern native bearers of the simple Russian linguistic consciousness. The following approaches have been applied within the framework of this research work: semantic analysis of texts, a psycholinguistic method, the method of interpretation of semantic dominants, and a contextual method. The following results have been obtained during the course of the analysis. The obtained associate show that the unit ‘tolerantnost’’ [tolerance] is interpreted through ‘terpimost’’ [lenience], ‘delikatnost’’ [delicacy], ‘sderzhannost’’ [restraint]; native speakers of Russian associate tolerance with the processes of globalization, democratization of the society, and humanism. However, the analysis of the modern Internet users’ texts allows for the conclusion that the concept under investigation has a more complicated structure. Tolerance in these texts is characterized both as an attitude with a strong axiological component and as a behavior, an external manifestation. Tolerance as an attitude is divided by the authors into positive (‘terpimoye’ [tolerable] in relation to other people) and negative one (‘molchalivoye’ [silent] behaviour towards negative socially significant phenomena). Tolerant behavior manifests itself as complete indifference to what is happening. The analysis of the texts of the last two years indicates transformation of the original meaning of the unit ‘tolerantnost’’ [tolerance] due to the currently changing ideology in the Russian society: a negative connotation has been recorded with the predominant components of the meaning ‘ravnodushiye’ [indifference], ‘drugoy’ [other], ‘chuzhdyy’ [alien], ‘zapret/ tabu’ [prohibition/ taboo], ‘privnesennyi’ [foreign], ‘Zapad’ [West], ‘bolezn’’ [disease], etc.