Verbalization of gender stereotypes as parts of language image of a holiday (based on the material of Ukrainian Soviet and modern journalism)

Abstract

The article is devoted to the consideration of the stereotype phenomenon linguo-cognitive and linguo-pragmatic aspects. We define a stereotype in connection with the notion of a frame in cognitive linguistics and note its features such as substantial simplification and significant stability. The study was carried out on the material of two chronologically and qualitatively different segments of Ukrainian media discourse (Soviet and modern). The thematically outlined segment was selected for analysis: the texts about the holidays and written for the holidays, which usually have a wide audience and potentially affect the formation of public consciousness via recording the proclaimed evaluations in the world language picture. Therefore, attention is paid to the functional aspect of the studied linguistic units. It was found that gender stereotypes, that is, those that determine the characteristic roles of men and women, occupy the most prominent place among the stereotypes verbalized in holiday journalism. Their use is usually a representation of one of two basic strategies. The first one is the strategy of stereotype assertion, which is a verbal confirmation of its existence and at the same time serves for its additional fixation in the world language picture. The second is a strategy of disproving, or deconstruction of a stereotype, which at the linguistic level is realized through direct negation or antithesis. We come to the conclusion that the majority of gender stereotypes in Soviet texts are purely propagandistic, in line with ideology, that is, they form stereotypical images in the world picture according to the first named strategy, while in modern writings we see attempts to get free from totalitarian influence, which is clearly shown by the functioning of these cognitive structures in the strategy of deconstruction.