THE DISCURSIVE EMOTIONAL ASPECT OF IDEOLOGICAL TRANSITIONS IN THE VICTORIAN AGE

Abstract

Introduction. The discursivity of emotions in ideology enactment is frequently questioned in ideology critique, whereas modern historical, psychological and social studies recognize the pertinence of emotions in shaping discursive practices. The current study argues the modulatory function of moral emotions in defining the complex phenomenon of Victorian ideology. Therefore, the dynamics of ideology proliferation is believed to ground in the emotional coherence of moral judgments.Purpose. The paper aims at investigating the large-scale process of ideology transitions characteristic of the Victorian period and beyond. The study lies in the assumption that ideological shifts pertaining to the period of the late 18th through early 20th centuries can be additionally tested in the term frequency of ideologically relevant issues as represented in the British English corpus brought by Google Books.Methods. Successive implementation of dictionary entry analysis, componential analysis, and machine based frequency analysis has testified to the plausibility of presumptions on the correlation of ideology long-term dynamics to the dominant emotional repertoires of the times.Results. The inventory of relevant ideologies has been provided in conformity with the earlier findings on the association of lexical representation of ideologies and moral emotions labels. The list of propositional ideologemes as fundamental doctrinal units of ideologies has been established basing on the common semantic features of nouns and adjectives defining the respective social practices in the contemporary dictionary entries. A frequency analysis aided by Google Books Ngram Viewer has evinced the heterogeneous process of ideologeme rises and declines.Conclusions. The ideological nature of moral emotions translates to their potency of modification or adjustment of propositional ideologemes in their further processing both for maintenance and/or transit. The trends are displayed in the dynamics of interest to the relevant ideological matters, in the changes of the semantic structure of lexicalized ideologemes andthe co-occurrence of emotion labels with the doctrinal linguoideologemes.