Social Stereotypes in Communicative Formulae: Sociometric Approach

Natalya Zavyalova

doi:10.5539/ass.v10n15p242

Abstract

The focus of the article is centered on society through the prism of communication. Modern data extraction and information retrieval methods allow building a new vision of communicative process. The article is focused on the example of language idiom representations and omnibus survey, which help concentrate on the most stable human society ways of expression. There is also an attempt to carry out a comparative analysis of social features of the East and the West with the help of on-line national languages’ corpuses. Omnibus survey results testify to the fact that low income people are reluctant to admit the influence of idioms on their day-to-day communicative practices, while rich people stress the significance of stable communicative formulae in their life. Societies are described through their attitude to labor, expressed in the idioms with a ‘hand’ component. With the help of electronic linguistic corpuses (Corpus of the Internet and business Chinese), KOTONOHA (Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese), BNC (British National Corpus), COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English) the research analyzes labor stereotypes on the basis of idiom frequency indexes. In practice the results of this study can be implemented in a special socio-cultural dictionary, where the most frequent idioms are given as social stereotypes and the most powerful symbolic tools of influence and manipulation. The results of these findings are relevant to multicultural societies, migration adaptation practices and global business development. The research results have been processed into a database, marked with the Rospatent Certificate (No. 2013620397, dated 03/13/2013. Rightholder: Limited Liability Company 'Content-Press' (RU). First Author: Yakovlev Igor Gennadievich (RU). Second Author: Zavyalova Natalya Alekseevna (RU)).

Highlights

For more than 6000 years society members have been channeling themselves through communication – from cave paintings to Facebook pages content
The article is focused on the example of language idiom representations and omnibus survey, which help concentrate on the most stable human society ways of expression
Omnibus survey results testify to the fact that low income people are reluctant to admit the influence of idioms on their day-to-day communicative practices, while rich people stress the significance of stable communicative formulae in their life

Summary

Introduction

For more than 6000 years society members have been channeling themselves through communication – from cave paintings to Facebook pages content. Sociology uses a number of communicative methods, based on interviewing people (see Lamont & Swidler, 2014). The approach is based on the assumption that for sociological purposes it is possible to concentrate on analyzing the language itself, rather than employing it as a useful tool. The proposed answer is the domain of idioms, as they represent culture connotations, codes and symbols, describing the ideas of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in every society. Which language items are of primary importance for describing social mechanics? Taken by the notion of Holocaust from the simple idiom of ‘atrocities of war’ to the Testament idiom ‘the dominant evil of our time’ (Alexander, 2003)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion