Festive discourse: a cognitive-discursive study

In the given article festive discourse is considered as an adaptive type ofdiscourse closely connected with other discourses. It is described by its basic characteristics: sociocultural,communicative, cognitive and linguistic.The author of the article understands festive discourse as a peculiar type of speech ritual groupactivity where the text continuum is aesthetically edited and determined by a socio-cultural situation.Festive discourse, as well as folklore discourse, as a part of the national language world pattern isan indicator of socio-cultural changes in the society, as it fixes these changes in texts. The commonnational festive discourse model has variations when functioning within certain sub-cultures; they formtheir peculiar festive world model, which is expressed in the genre system and its textualrepresentations.Study of festive discourse implies describing it considering the following features: 1) sociocultural;2) communicative; 3) cognitive; 4) linguistic.1) Modern festive discourse reflects the transitional period in the development of Russian societywhen traditional values are transformed, national-cultural borders are vague, new festive models areformed, which are reflected in a set of festive genres and texts. With a variety of sub-culturallydetermined festive models, the common features are purposes of the feast, world modelling means,tendency to simultaneous borrowing and preservation of traditional genres, connection with otherdiscourses.2) Chronotope is significant for festive discourse. It specifies discourse genres and their content.Festive communication has a set of communicative situations, discourse roles different from every-dayones. Discourse roles of communicants are determined by their statuses and roles outside festivediscourse. The choice of genres and their content displays not only the status of the speaker, but alsohis/her life ideology, personal features.The limited number of communicative situations implies few nuclear genres expressing them(greetings, wish, toast), which are characterized by unification and world modelling means. Closeconnection of festive discourse with discourses of other types allows speaking about genre diversity offestive discourse with folklore genres being of particular significance. The chastooshka and couplets(satirical songs) functioning in festive discourse participate in modelling the festive world patternreflecting cognitive sets of a certain group of people.3) Discourse forming festive concepts determined by genres and expressing basic valueorientations of people depend on the type of holiday.4) Linguistic features of the discourse are primarily determined by the aesthetic nature of festivediscourse. Lexical units contain a positive evaluation component, which is provided by the discoursetype.

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