Sense-Forming Function of Context in Publicistic Texts

Abstract

The effect-producing function of publicistic texts is realized within the framework of moral values existing in society; therefore, axiological value is an obligatory characteristic of a publicistic text. Since current moral values in society and public consciousness are not static and change due to events in political, economic, scientific, cultural and other areas of human life, we believe that publicistic texts reflect the condition of mentality of a particular society during a particular historical period. The main goal of this research is to study the impact of the social and cultural context on the semantic structure of publicistic texts and elucidate in what way this influence is relevant to the changes in social consciousness. The material of the study includes current Russian and Polish publicistic texts from mass media sources (“Regnum”, “Izvestia”, “Kommersant”, “PT”, “W polityce”, “Newsweek”, “dziennik.pl”, etc.), as well as Russian and Polish political lexicography (Mustafin 2012; Sanxharevskij 2010; Wasiluk, Zmarzer 2012, etc.), and the results of an associative experiment conducted among 170 Russian and Polish participants, The findings demonstate possible connections and further tendencies of the actualization of words, which deviate from dictionary meanings, The results of the investigation carried out with the help of contextual analysis also allowed us to conclude that the attention to the sense-forming function of the context is methodologically essential for the study of publicistic texts and their translation into a foreign language because the changes in people’s mentality under the influence of social and cultural contexts are materialized in the contextual meanings. They are also reflected in the transformation of word meanings: a word can acquire additional connotations or meanings which in some cases may fully replace the dictionary meanings. The results of the research can be used in sociolinguistics, lexicography and translation of publicistic texts.