Lexical dominants as components of the society value model

Abstract

The article examines functioning of the person names related to labor activity in the print media discourse of the Soviet period. Names of professions played a significant role in the texts of Soviet newspapers and functioned as a means of constructing the social identity of the country’s citizens. The most popular among them were nouns worker and collective farmer that indicated “prestigious” social classes in the Soviet Union. Groups of specific working and agricultural professions names were very frequent in the press publications and diverse in constituent units, while names of professions requiring special education and high qualification were quite rare in the press. A group of nouns denoting best workers (innovator, leader, stakhanovets, etc.) is specific to the analyzed historical period. In the Soviet time media names of persons indicating their work activities included evaluative, ideological and status pragmatic connotations. In the overwhelming majority of articles, they expressed positive evaluation and emphasized high status of people engaged in hard physical labor as well as their social significance in the society. The paper reveals that the leading type of identity in the press of the Soviet period was labor identity, and names of persons denoting their involvement in labor activity functioned in the press as keywords of the era, its lexical markers, ideological clichés and value dominants. They performed the following major functions: stimulated group solidarity, raised the value of the “man of labor” in the public consciousness, mobilized citizens for selfless labor and overfulfillment of norms and tasks.