Authors’ names:
- Lyudmila A. Brusenskaya – Rostov State University of Economics, Rostov-on-Don, Russia
- Alena R. Kotaeva – South Ossetian State University named after A. A. Tibilov, Beslan, South Ossetia
Abstract:
The article studies the content of “tolerance” – a most important concept for interdisciplinary studies, – by looking at its main nomination and analyzing its semantic and pragmatic content with a special emphasis on one of the sides of the semiotic essence of the lexeme: its syntactics. The article seeks to analyze the category of tolerance by examining the syntagmatics of its main nomination, the term “tolerance,” whose pragmatics has noticeably changed in recent years, reflecting value conflicts in society. The distribution of the term “tolerance” explicates different approaches that are essentially a manifestation of value conflicts in society. Information about the pragmatic content of the term is extracted from popularly used collocations by methods of cognitive, contextual, and linguopragmatic analysis. A sociolinguistic methodology based on the correlation of social and linguistic categories was also used. Tolerance has become recognized as an indispensable condition of life in a multicultural democratic society, where there are many faiths, ideologies, and political views, and where tolerance is able to ensure the “harmony of diversity.” In post-Perestroika Russia, tolerance began to be seen as one of basic values and a key regulator of social life. Moreover, tolerance was often understood not as passive tolerance for something “other,” whether different or unfamiliar, but as an active position promoting rele-vant ideas, opinions, and ideals. A tolerant attitude to something, however, cannot be characterized on the scale of meliorative-pejorative: the object to which the tolerant approach applies is important. A tolerant attitude to injustice, to crime, to immoral behaviour is an obvious evil, not a good. The third component of the linguistic sign (its syntactics) proves highly informative for its other aspects (semantics and pragmatics). Collocations that are currently popular carry negative connotations, highlighting the negative pragmatics of the term “tolerance” and expressing verbalized communicative clashes of different points of view. A new communicative practice of using the term “tolerance” is emerging, and this is entirely determined by extralinguistic circumstances.
| Section | LANGUAGE AND CULTURE |
| DOI: | 10.47388/2072-3490/lunn2023-63-3-37-50 |
| Downloads | 232 |
| Key words | tolerance; political correctness; value conflict; syntagmatics; syntactics; semantics; pragmatics |