Social Antinomies of Linguistic Consciousness

Abstract

This article focuses on the debate over Crimea's accession. The content analysis relies on data collected during the first and most turbulent year of Crimea's incorporation, which started with the decision to conduct a referendum on the Crimean status and then to declare Crimea's independence in March 2014. The sample consists of 50 entries published on LiveJournal, both posts and commentaries. We have discovered and problematized severe disagreements in bloggers' worldview that give rise to the antinomies of bloggers' linguistic consciousness. By this, we mean the use of words with opposite connotations relating to the same event within the same blog and an inconsistency between bloggers' perception of the event and the affective meanings of lexical items attached to it. Our main point is that Crimea's accession prompts bloggers to reduce this dissonance by “rolling up the semantic rainbow,” that is, by destroying meanings with rigid binary semantic opposition, which thereby further exacerbates deep-rooted divisions within Russian society where patriots and liberals increasingly keep apart.