The concept "sanctions" in humorous discourse

Abstract

Understanding the social and socio-political events of recent history allowed us to look at them through the prism of a laughing discourse. The events related to the special military operation intensified the topic of sanctions, including in a humorous way, which significantly expanded the semantic field of the concept “sanctions”. The aim of the work is to record the innovations contained in the genre format of comic texts about sanctions and in their content. In the study of humorous texts on sanctions, we used the method of conceptual analysis, which allowed us to obtain (1) knowledge about the concept existing in the minds of the concept carriers, (2) knowledge embedded by the author in the text (in our case, a humorous one). A frame-type model was developed to describe the concept “sanctions”. The methods of analysis developed by the theory of speech genres contributed to the identification of forms of presentation of humorous information. Humorous texts presented in open access on the Internet were taken as the empirical basis of the study by the continuous sampling method. To demonstrate the conclusions in the presented work, the texts of the first half of 2022 are mainly used. Applying the frame modeling methodology to the analysis of the concept “sanctions”, we consider the frame as a structure based on a deep multicomponent proposition with its semantic roles (subject, object, cause, purpose, tool, result), which is demonstrated in the article by concrete examples. Humorous texts, which were a kind of response to anti-Russian sanctions, differ in genre diversity (joke, gratitude, question-joke, chastushka, anti-slogan, transformed proverb, forecast, reproach, advice, announcement, advertisement, humorous rhymes). The genres of joke and meme have become the most widespread and active. The analysis of humorous texts of the period of sanctions allows, among other things, raising questions and problems that reflect the values and mood of the people through language. The humorous product demonstrates the creativity of people’s thinking and the creative potencies of language. The symbiosis of these components leads to an emotional evaluation of the situation. In this regard, the texts of humorous discourse, on the one hand, can be considered as a verbal weapon; on the other, as a psychological shield. The involvement of the method of conceptual analysis in the analysis of humorous texts of the sanctions discourse allowed us to form an idea of the spectrum of semantic potencies of the concept “sanctions” existing in the minds of native speakers of the Russian language. The frame modeling technique contributed to the disclosure of the knowledge laid down by the creators of anti-sanction texts, and the clarification of the semantic content of the concept through the analysis of emotive meanings.