Linguistically Stereotyped Picture of the World in Social Media Discourse on Death
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/lark.5688Keywords:
Keywords: death, life, linguistic image, Sentiment, Crisis, anthropocentric structure, cognitive semantics.Abstract
The main theme of this study is to explore the concept of death as represented in the national phraseological stereotypes via its semantic field. It delves into how could purely linguistic units with a specific semantic-syntactic organization, idiomatic complexes and metaphorical structures transpire into the stereotypical picture of the world (PoW) typify the collective consciousness of Arabic speakers, and define the essences of their culture. The scientific impulse underlying this work was triggered by the shocking trendy social media feeds on the tragic death of Raghad Sa’adun in a commercial building fire. The problem of the research is that the culturally linguistically fabricated stereotypes of life and tragic death remained beyond the attention of researchers in Arabic at the ontological, cosmogonic and axiological levels of the collective consciousness. The theoretical framework used to solve the essence of the research problem and analyse the dataset is an intriguing mixed-lens that combined the standpoints, terminological repertoire and analytical toolboxes adopted from Cognitive Semantics Construction Grammar and Speech Acts theory. The objective of the research is to identify in the semantic field of the stereotypes of "death", seeking to determine the specifics of correlations between Lexical Units, Frame Elements and Construction Units underlying the internal structure of the linguistic and conceptual picture of the world associated with death. Methodologically, the representative topic-based datasets in this study were extracted from Social Media Networks (SMNs) and online news articles, using WebCrawler tool and Application Programming Interface (API). The datasets were compiled by means of multiple query-based tasks. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the fact that for the first time, the semantic field of "death" stereotypes has been systematically derived from natural language use produced by actual netzines on SMNs using high tech automation software and AI tools. The results of the analysis revealed a network whose main parent frame is the rich central-periphery organisation of death lexicon, Unaccusative-Inchoative Constructions of a complex macro-frame and complex tapestry of emotions evoked by such frames. We thus have the first emerging conceptual sphere of the perspective established by our speakers of Arabic culture, regarding the experiences of death.
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