Modeling Concept Structure at the Stage of Ideologeme Destruction (based on the Concept LABOR in the Russian Worldview of 1980s-2000s)

Abstract

The paper analyzes the concept LABOR in the Russian worldview on the basis of 1980-2000 publicist contexts. The source of the material is the journalistic subcorpus of the “National Corpus of the Russian Language”. The main cognitive features of the concept LABOR are identified by analyzing semantics, pragmatics and contextual partners of the key lexemes representing the concept. The analysis of 500 publicist contexts has shown that the concept LABOR in publicist discourse possesses a variety of cognitive features, which indicates a multi-level structure of the concept. We distinguish three types of these features: anti-ideological, ontological (of objective and subjective nature), and social. All the three are due to the external historical changes, are relatively unstable and “responsible” for the structural changes of the concept. The analysis concludes that the Soviet regime and the historical situation had a significant impact on the language consciousness and mentality of native speakers at the conceptual and value levels. In the structure of the concept LABOR, the main changes are associated with the following components: subject, object, characteristics of labor, result, process, and addressee of labor. The most significant changes related to deideologization affected the blocks of ideas about the subject and addressee of labor (destruction of the idea about collective labor for the benefit of the country).