Representation of toponymic changes in the Russian-Ukrainian media discourse: Problems of national security and protection of historical memory

Abstract

The study of modern toponymic discourse in the mass media is one of the most pressing problems, since the introduction of “new toponymy” into active speech usage, into the cultural context of each member of the mass audience occurs precisely through the mass communication media. At the same time, the generalization of new toponymic units, even at the level of sentences, has a strong and direct impact on the behavior of the audience, the change and formation of the value system through historical and socio-cultural argumentation. Thus, changes in modern toponymy become part of the current linguistic and cultural concept, a linguistic source of information about the social, political, spiritual culture of the mass audience. Moreover, many examples of modern toponymy directly relate to issues of linguistic security in various aspects of media perception, a kind of humanitarian weapon in the confrontation of ideologies of states. Actual changes in toponymy, dictated by socio-political and historical-social circumstances, participate in the formation of a linguistic and cultural concept, which is formed as a result of the reduction of a fragment of the cognizable world to the limits of human memory and is included in the context of culture in verbal units necessary to meet the communicative needs of members of society. We consider the renaming of historical place names as a format for creating new linguistic concepts, part of a destructive information flow that is deliberately formed in the mass media, in the information flow of new media (telegram channels, social networks), creating an up-to-date media discourse. To study onomastic realities, it is necessary to develop a methodology for extracting cultural and historical information from the onomasticon, as well as a methodology for interpreting this information. This work is aimed at analyzing the current toponymic situation in the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations since 2014 and can be regarded as a contribution to the body of research of the cultural and historical onomasticon.