The “belarusian maidan” thesaurus as media speech reaction to the political context of events manifestation

Abstract

New linguistic formations in the media’s description and evaluation of the protest events in Belarus (“belmaidan”) on 09.08.2020 are considered as a thesaurus. The study is based on descriptions of the sociolinguistic and historical context of Belarusian realities, on the provisions of the reference theory (which manifests itself only in speech and represents not reality itself, but its image) and the theory of the thesaurus as a system of knowledge about the world, presented in texts and expressed in verbal signs. In the development of these theories, the main parameters of the “belmaidan” thesaurus are highlighted: subjects of speech, media texts and the thesaurus itself as a bicentric structure in the polarization of the centers we and they. New linguistic formations of the they-thesaurus are characterized in lexical-thematic, derivational and grammatical terms, as well as in their correlation with objects of reality: several synonymous variants of names that are isofunctional to a proper name correspond to the same referent, as a result these units form a structure of synonymous series different from the one in the dictionary. As a holistic mental-speech formation, the they-thesaurus, due to its communicative nature, referential orientation and attachment to reality, represents objective knowledge about a fragment of the real world and reveals its pejorative intentionality at the intertextual level. Two conclusions are drawn: the event thesaurus is a specific system with its own social time and space coordinate, having the structure and forms of expression, internal and external connections as well as capability to expand; the thesaurus analysis of media speech has explanatory power in the presentation of objective knowledge, on the one hand, and the expressive capabilities of language, on the other.