Lexical Means of Healthy Lifestyle Conceptualization in Modern Youth Media

Abstract

The article is devoted to identification of the lexical and semantic potential of healthy lifestyle conceptualization in youth media magazines. The purpose of the article is to analyze the semantics of lexical units of the “Healthy lifestyle” concept sphere in Russian linguoculture by exploring a sample of facts from youth online publications (magazines) through comparative analysis with data definitions from specialized scholarly literature. The material consists of articles from two online youth magazines editions — “Youngspace” and “YES!” — for 2008–2019. Using the method of continuous sampling, the author identifies some contexts containing direct and indirect nominations of the phenomena that create lexical and semantic fields of the “Healthy lifestyle” concept. These contexts are subject of cognitive-semantic analysis; the paper also uses general scholarly methods of describing and classifying linguistic phenomena, the method of quantitative processing of linguistic data (statistical method) and linguistic methods as such, i. e. the method of modeling cognitive and semantic fields, the method of cognitive interpretation of linguistic material. Methods of contextual, discursive, cognitive and semantic analysis, as well as methods of linguistic phenomena description and classification were used to identify the semantic potential of the “Healthy lifestyle” concept in the youth discourse of the media. The article proposes a model for the cognitive and semantic space of the “Healthy lifestyle” concept, developed on the basis of the analysis of the collected material. Lexical units of the semantic field of the “Healthy lifestyle” concept are distributed by lexical and semantic groups and are illustrated by facts taken from the youth media magazines. As a result of a comparative analysis with the logical and conceptual representation of this concept, the specificity of the cognitive and semantic space of healthy lifestyle in the discourse of youth magazines is determined. For young people, the most important component of understanding healthy lifestyle are various manifestations of a person's physical condition, as well as the interpretation of it as a social phenomenon, actively promoted and fashionable. Less frequent is the component “healthy lifestyle as a means to achieve an attractive appearance”, but it is not implemented in the logical and conceptual structure of the concept, which has been modeled earlier on the basis of dictionary and encyclopedic definitions analysis.

Keywords:

youth discourse in media, healthy lifestyle, cognitive and semantic model, lexical and semantic group