Pragmatic potential of lexemes designating persons by professions: the dynamic aspect (by example of the lexeme teacher)

The article describes the dynamics of the pragmatic components of the lexical meaning of the word teacher: status, ideological and cultural components. The status component is the prestige or non-prestige of the profession; the ideological component is the acceptability or unacceptability of the political position, social system, and, as applied to the teaching profession in its modern sense, correspondence with the regulations of the Ministry of Education of the Russian Federation; the cultural component of lexical meaning determines the role of the specified activity in the spiritual nature of the society or of a certain person. To find the above mentioned components a complex of research methods is applied: corpus analysis, lexicographic analysis and discourse analysis. The combination of the specified methods can explain the changes in the semantics and specific features of the usage of a lexical unit of the language in any discourse conditions. The analysis of the National Russian Corpus data shows the importance of the lexeme teacher in the speech of Russian native speakers: it is second most frequent in the theme group of lexemes designating persons by profession. At the same time the sharp growth of combinability of the noun teacher with adjectives simple, ordinary is observed, which shows the ambivalence in the pragmatic characteristics of the lexeme teacher. The article presents the zone distribution of the status, ideological and cultural components of the lexical meaning of the word teacher by the data of three dictionaries: 1) The Explanatory Dictionary of the Russian Language by D.N. Ushakov (1930-1940s); 2) The Dictionary of the Russian Language by A.P. Evgenyeva (1950-1980s); 3) The Dictionary of the Russian Language by S.I. Ozhegov and N.Yu. Shvedova (1997). The analysis showed that pragmatic components are mainly presented in the illustrative zone of the dictionaries; moreover, the dictionaries specialized on different pragmatic components: 1 - ideological component, 2 - cultural component, 3 - status component. The lexicographic method of definition of the specified components can be useful only to a certain degree as the dictionary reflects dynamic processes of understanding of pragmatic resources of the lexeme, but cannot give them completely. The discourse analysis shows that the pragmatic components available in the contexts with the lexeme teacher are closely connected with the communicative situation, with the genre of the text and the author's communicative task. Thus, teachers' self-descriptions presented at the competition "I Am a Teacher" are filled with the pathos of the extraordinary role of this profession in the society (the cultural pragmatic component, the component of the super-prestigious status). Texts without this pathos are generated in informal situations - in conversations of teachers discussing their work, low wages, large number of lessons, etc. Formal texts show that the society constantly attributes additional pragmatic functions to the teacher. The teacher has no right to be a simple instructor. The society constantly uses teachers as a resource of education and ideology; the set of functions attributed is dependent on the historical period.

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