Соціокультурні стереотипи в англомовному медійному дискурсі: динамічний аспект

Abstract

The article is devoted to the results of the research of sociocultural stereotypes’ development in American media discourse. In the work, sociocultural stereotypes are considered as verbalized cognitive constructs that form a system of interrelated ideas about the categories of a social world. Changes that happen with stereotypes are conditioned by social, cultural, and media factors, reflected in the language. The development of sociocultural stereotypes represents the stages of their formation, functioning, changes, activation, and inactivation. The formation of a socio-cultural stereotype is based on the process of evaluative categorization, the result of which is fixed by a social consciousness in the form of linguistic designations. Embedding of sociocultural stereotypes in media discourse and their use in accordance with communicative intent of speakers determines the stage of their functioning, which leads to changes of their designation or evaluative meaning. Increasing circulation of sociocultural stereotypes in the media discourse defines the stage of their activation, which manifests itself in the emergence of word-formation paradigms of stereotype’s designation represented by a single word. Inactivation is a decrease in manifestations of interest in a socio-cultural stereotype in the media discourse, which leads to its disappearance. At the stage of inactivation, caused by lack of new information about the referent or changes in opinion about it, a designation of a sociocultural stereotype disappears or loses its connotations, remaining in the language as the marker of a certain historical and cultural period.