“Workaholics are welcome!”: some dynamical processes in the Russian language consciousness of the early XXI century

The article is devoted to the current tendencies in the semantics of a word workaholic in the modern Russian language. The general idea of the article is that changes in the lexical meaning reflect the appearance of fundamentally new features of Russian mentality, influenced by the cultural stereotypes of the Western world. Based on the study of the texts in the mass media it is stated that the word workaholic expands its semantics, new semantic features appear that are not represented in dictionaries. Special attention is paid to the influence of the context environment on the formation of a positive connotation of the word. The author concludes that the word workaholic shifts towards semantic fields “success” and “career”, that allows to speak about the domination of the personal values in the modern society, with material welfare taking an important place. The author traces the formation of new stereotypes, identifying and describing the specifics of the language representation of Russian people relations to hard, intensive work with full dedication and maximum application of their efforts. To achieve this goal, the article summarizes the results of studies of different types of texts: proverbs, dialectal speech, the soviet political discourse.