Verbalization of the

Abstract

The article deals with studying of one of the basic cultural and psychological oppositions forming the cognitive value-appraisal picture of the world, the rich and the poor dichotomy and its verbalizations in the language of mass media. Specificity of representation of the rich/poor bipolarity as dominants of the journalistic text and as one of the ways of linguistic cognition of the world is defined. The method of continuous sampling, method of component-definitional analysis, descriptive method, including observation and classification of the material under study, and evidently the contextual analysis have been used as the major methods of research. At first, the microcontexts are analyzed, where the poor/rich dichotomy is considered as the subject-bearer of the feature. The paradigmatic set of nominations of subject-bearers of the rich/poor feature by occupation, age, social status, etc., is revealed. Secondly, the analysis of verbalization in the newspaper text of the items of possession of the poor/rich (nominations combined by the meaning of "food", "clothing", "housing", etc.) is presented. Thirdly, the analysis of contexts depicting the style and lifestyle of the poor/rich is given. The rich/poor binary code in the linguistic space of the Russian and English mass media has exposed a wide range of lexico-semantic links promoting formation of semantic sets and paradigms based on synonymy and antonymy, phraseological and associative representations and images, valence of the word and its contextual interaction.