Values as an object of manipulation: axiological dimension of Russian linguistic worldview revisited

Drawing on the case of the comfort lexeme functioning in Russian publicist and media discourse the article analyzes value transformations in Russian Weltanschauung that have resulted from indirect verbal manipulation. The authors hold that on its entering the Russian language in the 1830s the English loanword комфорт / comfort nominated a foreign cultural value that constituted both a conceptual and a linguistic lacuna. Tenets of ascetic self-restraint ethics that, being grounded in the Eastern Christian tradition, constituted the dominant value-behavioral model of Russian 19th century society, prevented the latter from embracing cultural values denoted by the blanket term comfort. The authors demonstrate that at the turn of the 21st century comfort was regularly used by the Russian media as a powerful manipulative linguistic tool to bring about profound axiological transformations that accompanied the shift from collective society to that of market economy. Within the pragmatic framework of the hedonistic doctrine that is propagated in today’s media-regulated society comfort denotes one of the dominant values that are eagerly embraced by many as the only goal of human existence. Mass replication in Russian media discourse of the appealing image of “a wonderfully comfortable life” is manifested, among other things, in the unprecedented increase in the comfort- group lexemes frequency as well as in the almost unlimited expansion of their semantic collocability. This all both illustrates and accelerates the infiltrating of the quasi-value of comfort into most spheres of human existence.