“Samoizolyatsiya” (“self-isolation”) as the newest Russian cultural concept: cognitive-discursive aspect
The article examines the reflexes of the discursive variation of the word “samoizolyatsiya” (“self-isolation”) as a representative of the concept of the same name in the speech practice of Russian native speakers of the latest period associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The author proceeds from the assumption that the speech actualization of collocations and free word combinations, which include the lexeme “samoizolatsia” (“self-isolation”), makes it possible to detect an implicit semantic divergence between its “official”, declared socio-political content and its natural language representation in the contexts of common usage of the word. The work shows that in such expressions as “rezhim samoizolyatsii” (“self-isolation regime”), “indeks samoizolyatsii” (”self-isolation index”), “otpravit' na samoizolyatsiyu” (“send for self-isolation”), “prinuditel'naya samoizolyatsiya” (“forced self-isolation”), etc., the obligatory implication of the voluntariness of this situation is eliminated, which is available in the natural language representation of the word “samoizolatsia” (“self-isolation”) and inherent in its original meaning in Russian. It is noted that in the functioning of the lexeme “samoizolatsia” (“self-isolation”) an internally contradictory cognitive model of the situation of legislative coercion of citizens to voluntarily restrict their rights is verbalized and reproduced clichéd. It is concluded that the discursive variation of the word “samoizolatsia” (“self-isolation”) as an representative of a complex of certain socially-significant information in the speech practice of modern Russian society in the COVID-19 era contains all the signs of an ideologeme and actualizes the communicative strategy of euphemization in order to veil some negative aspects of the established social reality through manipulative mechanisms of appeal to the positive values of debt before society, moral responsibility of a citizen, socially-useful behavior, etc.