Processes of ideologization and de-ideologization in Russian religious dictionary

The paper is focused on studying the changing fragments of the Russian picture of the world documented in lexicographic sources of the Soviet era and the post-Soviet period, as well as in contemporary discourse. There are “eternal” concepts in the ideological field of society, reflected in the lexicon of native speakers as ideologemes. These lexemes represent the value system of a particular confession, social group, etc. It is this lexical layer that most acutely responds to socio-economic and political changes in society. The authors analyze the dynamic processes of a pragmatically marked fragment of a dictionary (religious vocabulary) during the 20th - early 21st centuries. The starting point is D. N. Ushakov’s Russian Explanatory Dictionary, which provides a thorough representation of religious lexicon, with interpretations determined by the ideological context of 1930-1940. Today, the strong and weak points of describing the lexicon, that was “alien” for the Soviet period, are obvious. The analysis of vocabulary and corpus data allows us to formulate a hypothesis about the emergence of ambivalent (positive and negative) connotations in the lexical array, which has recently been interpreted as neutral by dictionaries. Thus, when filled with new pragmatic content and reflecting significant changes in the socio-political life of society, the semantics of a religious word, as ideologically marked during a century, changes its connotative halo several times. The ideological and related evaluative components reflect one of the most controversial fragments of the linguistic picture of the world in modern Russia.

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