LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL FEATURES OF THE SUBSTANDARD LEVEL OF LANGUAGE IN LITERARY TEXTS OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE XX – EARLY XXI CENTURIES

Research article
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60797/RULB.2024.57.7
Issue: № 9 (57), 2024
Suggested:
03.07.2024
Accepted:
27.08.2024
Published:
09.09.2024
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Abstract

The article examines the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the substandard based on the material of artistic works of the second half of the XX – early XXI centuries. Substandard linguistic units, such as, for example, jargon and slang are an integral part of the artistic space when it comes to a realistic recreation of a certain period of time, describing the inner experiences of characters, verbalizing the worldview of the characters of the works. The use of a linguistic substandard allows you to recreate the linguistic and conceptual picture of the world not only of the characters of the work, the system of their norms and values, but also to rise to generalization and understanding of reality. The main functions of substandard units are ideological and emotional-evaluative, as well as cognitive, less often nominative.

1. Introduction

The study of the substandard in the modern artistic space of Russian-language prose is a complex linguistic and cultural problem, since its representation is part of the author's artistic intention and does not always fully reflect the real linguistic picture of a certain historical epoch, undergoing transformation with a certain pragmatic task.

We consider substandard broadly in the paradigm of T.A. Kudinova's scientific vision. She indicates that "substandard refers to all manifestations of the national language, with the exception of the normalized literary language (that is, dialects, vernacular, social and corporate jargons, which have unusually expanded their scope in recent years)"

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The substandard differs from the standard (literary language), as it has its own customary norms. V.P. Korovushkin also wrote about this in the monograph "Fundamentals of Contrastive Sociolectology", in particular, he defines a substandard as "a historically formed, relatively stable, complex, systemically organized autonomous existential macroform of a national language or its national variant, consisting of systemically organized private existential and non-existential language forms and their elements"

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The substandard in its various manifestations, especially within the frames of jargon and youth slang, at the end of the XX – beginning of the XXI century develops extremely quickly, a large number of new lexical units appear, naming the objects and phenomena of reality that have appeared, which is directly reflected in various literary texts.

Substandard linguistic phenomena allow native speakers to comprehend the surrounding reality by objectifying fundamentally new phenomena in new speech formulas, evaluative lexical and phraseological units

. A substandard is necessary for the language to express special emotional states and assessments, a vivid expression of emotions. The new lexemes and phrasemes of the substandard essentially update the fund of evaluative tools of the modern language.

In this study, a semantic analysis of substandard linguistic units recorded in works of fiction of the mid-XX – beginning of the XXI century was used. When analyzing the linguistic and cultural features of substandard units, we relied on the main provisions of the works of V.M. Mokienko, T.G. Nikitina, M.A. Grachev.

We also used in the research a structural analysis of lexicographic works in the field of linguistic substandard.

2. Main part

Studies of the modern substandard and its particular manifestations are ordered and reflected in numerous lexicographic works that make it possible to systematically study these phenomena.

Among such works it is necessary to name the "Great Dictionary of Russian Jargon" by V.M. Mokienko and T.G. Nikitina

, which gives the most complete interpretation, etymological reference, stylistic marks and provides a number of contexts, and in the case of interpretation of substandard phraseology the dictionary offers variants of phraseological units.

Currently, V.M. Mokienko and T.G. Nikita are working on replenishing the vocabulary of this dictionary and in the article "Axiology of neo-phrasemes and neo-transformations" they indicate that "the rate of replenishment of the phraseological fund of colloquial speech and media discourse with pejoratively colored phrases that exist in the criminal environment and youth counterculture is gradually decreasing. Literature, cinema, political discourse, and advertising of the corresponding periods remain the traditional sources of new phraseology of various axiological loadings. Evaluative figurative compound names of new facts and trends in the socio-political and economic spheres penetrate and adapt from the English language into the media discourse, slang English-language phrases are used without adaptation in youth speech"

. We point out that this statement is true not only in describing the modern linguistic situation in the field of neo-phrasem, but also in determining the vector of development of youth slang, various types of jargon and substandard in general.

In the lexicographic work "Russian Jargon: A Historical and Etymological Dictionary" by V.M. Mokienko and M.A. Grachev

, a description of substandard units in diachrony is presented for the first time, a change in their semantic content is traced, and broad contexts are given. This dictionary makes it possible to correctly interpret the semantics of substandard units in the artistic space of books by A.I. Solzhenitsyn, V.T. Shalamov, A.I. Pristavkin, E. Limonov, D. Gutsko and Zakhar Prilepin.

The substandard in artistic discourse, first of all, performs the function of creating a certain socio-cultural background of the work, realistically describing reality. The socio-cultural context in artistic discourse is associated with specific manifestations of the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the text.

The importance of describing the linguistic and cultural basis of a literary text has been recognized in Russian linguistics in recent decades, and studies of linguistic and cultural information of various literary texts have appeared. The linguistic and cultural foundations of the ethnic and mental representations of the people correlate with the axiological system of values, identify specific and universal fundamental ideological attitudes, which is directly reflected in specific artistic texts.

In the article "The linguistic and cultural space of Russian poetry and the peculiarities of its translation into Chinese", the authors note that "the linguistic and cultural space of the language includes the richest cultural and historical centuries-old experience of the people, which subsequent generations receive simultaneously with the assimilation of the national language. The possibilities of language as a communicative information system and translator of the culture of the people are most clearly manifested in a special form of the national language – in a literary text"

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The linguistic and cultural space of a literary text is a product of describing a certain cultural reality, an expression of value and pragmatic national attitudes, and stereotypes of both the ethnos as a whole and individual social groups discussed in the work.

Without studying lexical and phraseological units with a national cultural component, including substandard units, without interpreting symbols and precedent elements significant for a particular linguistic culture, it is impossible to analyze either the explicit or implicit foundations of the text. The subject matter and problems of the work of art correlate with the linguistic and cultural characteristics of the text.

For example, without understanding the socio-cultural characteristics of the historical era of repression in Soviet Russia, it is not possible to analyze the problems of the story "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" by A. Solzhenitsyn, which is directly related to the correct understanding of the semantics of substandard lexical units of camp jargon.

Let us give as an example an excerpt from the story "One Day of Ivan Denisovich" by A. Solzhenitsyn.

“The cook didn’t carry that stuff himself on the two-mile march from the camp. He had a trusty who carried it for him. He thought it was better to slip an extra portion of the stuff to a trusty at the expense of the prisoners’ bellies rather than break his own back” 

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The linguistic and cultural characteristics of a literary text are related to the conceptual and linguistic picture of the world. The linguistic picture of the world reflected in a specific text is a representation and interpretation of the ideas of a person, a social group of a particular epoch about the essence of the world order.

In the works of fiction by Russian authors of the second half of the XX – early XXI century, describing deep social conflicts of a political nature, the interpretation of the essence of the ongoing socio-political changes and socio-cultural shifts in the mentality of society occurs with the involvement of a significant amount of substandard vocabulary and phraseology.

E.I. Zinovieva, analyzing the essence of the linguistic picture of the world, rightly notes that the text "being derived from the meeting of the subject with a communicative event, it is by it that the preposition is judged, and the picture of the world is derived from the worldview, but it is by it that the model of mentality is reconstructed"

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The picture of the world of the authors of literary texts, whose vocabulary and phraseology are mostly substandard, is associated with "certain landmarks of worldview" (the term of E.I. Zinovieva).

The use of a substandard in artistic texts of this kind is associated with the author's worldview paradigm, which in turn is determined by the socio-cultural background of the work.

For example, A.I. Solzhenitsyn pointed out that his works about the Gulag are not intended to actually show the mechanism of repression, but to consider the categories of good and evil that determine the moral consciousness of each person. The writer, not without reason, argued that the boundary between good and evil passes "not between states, not between classes, not between parties, but through every human heart – through all human hearts. This line is mobile, it fluctuates in us over the years. Even in a heart full of evil, she holds a small foothold of goodness. Even in the kindest heart, there is an ineradicable corner of evil"

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Since the ideological basis of Solzhenitsyn's camp prose is an analysis of the axiology of values, a small amount of vocabulary and phraseology of camp jargon turns out to be natural. The artistic space of Solzhenitsyn's camp prose necessarily includes a certain amount of substandard vocabulary, the dosed use of which becomes a marker for expressing particularly strong emotions and vivid appreciation. The expletive and slang vocabulary in Solzhenitsyn's texts is part of the linguistic and cultural space, pragmatically significant for expressing the idea of the work.

3. Conclusion

In a number of literary texts of the second half of the XX – beginning of the XXI century, the authors strive to reflect the features of the era as fully as possible, realistically convey the details of time through the description of the situation of communication of the characters. Therefore, the abundance of slang and slang expressions seems pragmatically justified and necessary.

It should be noted that slang and jargon are used in the text in a dosed manner, in cases where the replicas of characters with these units are necessary to represent the assessment and at the same time reflect the interpretation of events, the implicit expression of cognitive function in a given work of fiction.

In combination with jargon and slang, stylistically reduced vocabulary allows you to recreate the linguistic and conceptual picture of the world not only of the characters of the work, the system of their norms and values, but also to rise to generalization and comprehension of the real reality of Russia during the period of socio-political changes at the beginning of the XXI century.

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