The actualization of the category "insiders-outsiders" in the image-building discourse in the educational sphere

Relevance of the research of the image-building educational discourse is determined by a number of extralinguistic factors. First of all, the system of higher education has been located in the center of public and political attention over the past ten years. It was caused by the entry of Russian universities in the Bologna process and the formation of new state-level socio-economic requirements of the Russian education system as a whole. Competition between universities in the fight for entry into the international ratings rises every year. In addition, universities strengthen their positions as important image-modeling factors of regions and cities. An important task for them is to create and promote the university as a brand. Using of the cognitive category "insiders-outsiders'' can be an effective tool of creating a positive image. This category can represent objects at different levels. Universities can use this property of the basic category for self-presentation in specialized media. There are a number of works about the analysis of means of expression of the category "insiders-outsiders''in various types of discourse in modern linguistics. Basic researches of this category are the researches of dialectal discourse. Opposition of members in this category is universal. As a result, there were researches developed at the confluence of social science and cognitive linguistics and devoted to the study of implementation methods of the above mentioned category in different media texts in Russian linguistics over the last years. The category "insiders-outsiders'' plays an important role in structuring of institutional educational discourse. This article is an attempt to describe the features of its explication in the all-Russian newspaper Poisk (search) texts about the activities of Tomsk universities. Most of the analyzed texts aim at creating the positive image of a particular institution in the reader's mind. The purpose of these publications is the most complete and convincing self-presentation of universities. During the work about 130 feature articles and soft-news have been analyzed. About 50 utterances with the semantics of "insiders-outsiders'' explicated on the different levels of language have been selected. Based on this analysis, we can conclude that the basic category of "insiders-outsiders'' is important for educational discourse. It is explicated in the texts of the media on the four levels of language: lexical, morphological, syntactical and textual. Most commonly this category is expressed by lexical units with the semantics of "insiders-outsiders", tokens compatibility, metaphors of kinship, personal and possessive pronouns. In most cases category of "insiders-outsiders'' is expressed by lexemes with semantic of "insiders-outsiders", lexemes of compatibility, metaphors of kinship, personal and possessive pronouns. The opposition "insiders-outsiders'' has two main functions in the texts of educational discourse. The first function consists in presenting "insiders'' in the reader's mind as a group of people with special positive features. The second function consists in modeling of a positive image of the university using the positive image of its successful students, graduate students, alumni and staff.

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