THE SOCIAL PORTRAIT OF A PERSON IN THE LINGUISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF PHILOLOGY STUDENTS

Abstract

Based on names that are relevant to the linguistic consciousness of philology students, this article examines the social portrait of a person. The study is motivated by the need to investigate the linguistic consciousness of the younger generation as an indicator of social changes and value orientations. Names of people prevalent among young people reflect social stereotypes of language speakers, the hierarchy of salient categories, and attitudes toward speech normativity. The empirical basis consists of materials from an online survey of 56 informants, aimed at identifying names of people that are used and familiar to respondents and that characterize a person by profession and occupations, social status, interpersonal relationships, social roles, material conditions, and other parameters. The survey yielded 897 responses, which were analyzed; after normalization, 286 unique lexemes were identified. The article presents the results of frequency analysis and lexicosemantic classification and examines the traditional asymmetry in kinship terms, as well as in gender- and profession-based designations. Based on semantic analysis, all names were distributed across seven groups: "Professions and Occupations" (47.7 %), "Kinship and Family Relationships" (19.1 %), "Social Stratification" (13.6 %), "Interpersonal Relationships" (9.5%), "Character and Personal Qualities" (5.5 %), "Gender and Age Characteristics" (3.0 %), and "Ideology, Religion, Worldview" (1.5 %).